Hello everyone. I like to think you are indefatigable.1

Thank you for joining this week and welcome to all our new subscribers. I will continue the morning reading experiment next week. And thank you to those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions.

Here’s a review of some experiments and traditional work this week in case you missed any of it:

This week I wrote about the presidency and the Iran war, reflected briefly on our love of Dollywood and examined the mounting bottlenecks created by artificial intelligence. On the Gabfest we discussed the Supreme Court ruling on mail ballots, the U.S. trade war with Canada, and AI security in “Please Do Not Ruin the Post Office”.

I also tried a few experiments inspired by my morning reading: Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.

“The Morning Ballet” wasn’t an experiment at all, but visual proof of the exciting action in Navel Gazing, Episode One. I also posted Episode Four of Navel Gazing, “John Dickerson explores the meanings of a giant bed, initials and The Sopranos”. You can browse the full archive at JohnDickerson.com.

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A lovely note form reader Beth Kapocias echoing the themes of Navel Gazing Episode Four:

I’ve been enjoying your Navel Gazing Podcast as much as your Stack the Week offering. I can see that it takes a bit of doing, so I wanted you to know your efforts are appreciated.

Yesterday my daughter and I were returning from a trip to Washington DC. Before the train left the station, she took out her watercolor field box, and asked if we’d brought along any water (she hasn’t yet got the hang of filling the water container). When we realized we neglected to bring a bottle of water, I remembered I’d packed my watercolor field box I’d used in 1993. I said perhaps there’s water in there from the 1900’s. And indeed, there was! Her eyes widened, as she was astounded to be painting with water from another century and another continent away.

A few items from the morning news:

Trump wanted lower rates. His Fed chairman just put a rate increase on the table.

Donald Trump selected Kevin Warsh after repeatedly attacking the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too high—and Trump reportedly sought reassurance that his nominee would lower them. But Warsh promised to protect the Fed’s independence, and his August 28 Jackson Hole speech demonstrated what that can mean in practice.

Warsh said inflation remained too high and suggested that rate increases might be necessary. In a matter of hours, traders raised the estimated probability of a September increase from 35% to nearly 58%, while the two-year Treasury yield jumped from approximately 4.22% to 4.35%.

Bank of America will pay $72.5 million to as many as 75 Epstein accusers.

A federal judge gave final approval to Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with as many as 75 women who accused the bank of facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse. Bank of America denied knowing about Epstein’s trafficking operation and admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement provides a financial consequence without resolving the underlying question of what the bank knew—or should have recognized—while servicing Epstein and his associates.

In 250 years, Americans have elected only three Black governors. Eight are on ballots this year.

Thousands of people have served as American governors, but voters have elected only three Black governors in the country’s history: Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick and Maryland’s Wes Moore. All three are Democratic men. This year, eight Black major-party candidates—including five Democrats and three Republicans, and both men and women—are appearing on gubernatorial ballots. Even if none wins, the field is historically unprecedented. If several win, an office that has remained overwhelmingly white for 250 years could change visibly in a single election.

A Tree Keeps Growing in Brooklyn.

A silver maple stood in the middle of what two Brooklyn developers considered an ideal building site. It was approximately six stories tall, with a trunk five feet across—and removing it would have been the conventional real-estate decision. Instead, the developers spent approximately $400,000 redesigning and constructing their project around the tree. They compared the decision to rescuing a geriatric dog: financially irrational, perhaps, but difficult to resist once the living thing was in their care.

Now some sparkles:

Wildlife Photography.

I find these photographs transporting: The Wildlife photographs of the year.

A Record at the Plate.

“I just wanted to do something spectacular,” 12-year-old Carsynn Meyer told USA Today after hitting a double in her final at-bat of Nevada’s regional championship victory over Montana. The hit helped send her team to the Little League World Series, where Meyer became the first girl under the tournament’s current format to reach the United States championship game. Looking into the stands after the double, she remembered hearing the crowd screaming.

The achievement carried more than half a century of history. In 1972, 12-year-old Maria Pepe pitched three games for a Little League team in Hoboken, New Jersey, before officials forced her off the roster because girls were barred from the program. The resulting court case compelled Little League to admit girls in 1974, although Pepe had already aged out. Meyer first visited Williamsport in June for an all-female tournament named in Pepe’s honor. Two months later, she returned with her Nevada teammates—the boys “CarCar” had played beside for years.

Faster!

Everything feels like it moves so fast these days. Even the Universe is speeding up: A new analysis of Type Ia supernovas disputes recent suggestions that the universe’s expansion has begun to slow. Cosmic expansion still appears to be accelerating, leaving dark energy in its commanding—but entirely mysterious—place in the prevailing account of the universe.

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The idea of this morning recapitulation of my thoughts that occurred to me while I’m doing my morning reading was affirmed by the practice of Deborah Martinson. She was an adjunct professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I was reading her analysis of crime and punishment and learned that after every seminar she would email students a recap of what they had discussed in that seminar that day. This seems to me to be a wonderful thing to do as a teacher. If nothing else, it respects and lifts up the opinions of the students. But it also is a way to lock in the learning in the seminar for the professor.

I wish I had done this at the University of Chicago during my seminars this spring.

JD Vance endorsed Donald Trump in 2023 under the headline “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

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This is another experiment. Not the morning reading. I’ve been doing that for a while. The experiment is to write, though exactly what that means I’m not sure. Perhaps the point is to see what happens when the morning’s information undergoes an immediate translation into words, sentences and paragraphs.

Some of this will feel familiar to Navel Gazing regulars. In part, the goal is slowness, to proceed at the pace of thought. This offers an antidote to the pace of the day and the shredded feeling the day will produce. Even yesterday’s writing about the presidency produced a ragged feeling.

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We went to Dollywood a lot with the kids. It’s easy to write off a theme park with a rich woman’s name on the gate as a vanity project. It wasn’t. Not shabby, not cynical. Clean, available to everyone. Close to her roots. (It’s built in the part of Tennessee she grew up poor in and run by the people she grew up among.)

It wasn’t a monument. It was a place families saved up for. The squeak across the seats on the tram from the parking lot. The sit-down after too much funnel cake. The locomotive whistle. Thunderhead.

This isn’t in the top five (ten?) things Dolly accomplished. Still, it affected a lot of people anyway.

Most of what success leaves behind is objects that testify to financial wealth — houses, yachts, jewelry. Dollywood testified to a different wealth. She built somewhere a family could afford to be happy for a day, and made sure it stayed that way for forty years.

The great American national-security blunders have taken different forms: the groupthink behind the Bay of Pigs, Lyndon Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, the failure to connect the dots before 9/11, and the false assumptions, faulty intelligence and wishful planning that produced the Iraq War.

These four are the canon of blundering. In each, the president was one part of an institutional failure — advisers who missed signals, agencies that got the intelligence wrong, a process that broke down around him. Trump’s may be a new kind — not a failure of process, but a failure housed more centrally in the president himself, who actively rejected the process. The intelligence was right. The failure is his alone. That’s worth remembering next time a candidate boasts that he alone can fix something. It’s a warning.

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The warnings were specific. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely produce “a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons.” She warned that Tehran would “rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market,” and attack American forces and partners in the region. Military leaders warned of casualties, depleted weapons stockpiles and readiness problems for an already overstretched force.

All of it happened. The war Trump promised would end within six weeks has reached the six-month mark without a clear end.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Eric Brewer, a former national-security official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Journal.

I want to make a larger point but first, to show that I have metabolized the scale of the harm of this decision: we are watching the consequences spool out in real time as the administration lunges toward something it can call success. Consider the new economic sanctions announced Monday. Enforcing them against the Chinese institutions that sustain Iran could provoke a confrontation with Beijing. Declining to enforce them could expose another American threat as hollow. Longer term, the U.S. has burned through roughly two-thirds of its Patriot interceptor stockpile and close to half its THAAD inventory in under six months of fighting — inventories that take years, not months, to rebuild. And there are other years-long consequences: bruised alliances, and nations making choices based on a new — and perhaps warped — understanding of American strategic confusion.

So put this on the to-do list: catalog the consequences of this decision and reward those who come up with the most creative and realistic solutions for containing those consequences and addressing the fallout. This is one way to combat the despair people feel when faced with the president’s combination of bluster and incompetence. Look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers used to say. Seek out and lift up the people who can scope the problem, name the challenges and identify realistic ways of limiting the damage and beginning the repair.

This brings us (if you’re still with me; I feel like I should pack a juice box to give us all a little energy at this point) to my little corner of obsession: presidential campaigns.

Everything about Donald Trump’s decision-making is bad enough, but it gets worse when you measure his performance against his boasts about how he would perform as president. Donald Trump ran on the promise that he had a special quality in just these moments. In the South Carolina primary debate in 2016, he offered his opposition to the Iraq War as evidence of his superior judgment. He also stood by his earlier claim that George W. Bush had lied the country into war.

“The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We shoulda never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” When the debate moderator (hi Mom!) reminded him that he had said Bush should have been impeached, Trump replied: “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

Earlier in the debate, I had asked Trump to imagine his first day in the Situation Room and name the first three questions he would ask his national-security experts. Robert Gates had complained that the candidates were offering solutions “so simplistic and so at odds with the way the world really works.” Trump’s answer: “What we wanna do, when we wanna do it, and how hard do we wanna hit.”

Oof.

In that same debate, Jeb Bush, who was derided as insufficient for the task of being president, nevertheless outlined a vision of the office.

“The next president’s gonna be confronted with an unforeseen challenge,” Bush said in his closing statement, sounding like the son and brother of presidents who understood one of the defining characteristics of the job. “It could be a pandemic, a major natural disaster or an attack on our country.” The question for voters, he said, was “who do you wanna have sittin’ behind the big desk in the Oval Office?”

Next presidential campaign, listen to Jeb.

Wait, every presidential candidate boasts. Trump is hardly new. Yes, they boast, and they shouldn’t, unless they have the goods. Matching promises with performance is, after all, essentially the job description. More important, we shouldn’t let candidates get away with boasts they can’t back up.

One more point (hit the juice box!): Donald Trump’s boasts were special. He dismissed — and won escalating applause for dismissing — the very idea of planning, expertise and knowledge. He argued that every challenge could be made to disappear by the force of his personality.

No.

The Iran case provides an unusually clean test of his claim: The experts identified the risks, the president trusted his instincts, and the risks became reality.

Every presidential national-security decision comes down to one person. The question was never whether a president acts alone against expert advice — sometimes that’s the job. Barack Obama learned this: he ordered the Bin Laden raid over the explicit objection of Robert Gates, who had more national-security experience than anyone else in the room. The question is how a president makes a lonely decision. Obama had a room of mixed opinion and picked the more confident read. Trump had a room in agreement and picked the opposite of what it told him.

Experts, historians and wise people of good faith could help place this decision among other presidential failures — and determine, based on the reporting, just how badly President Trump shanked it. (Those with expertise will know how to sort post-hoc ass covering now that things have not gone according to plan).

This would help us understand the Trump presidency. It would also help us, in advance of another presidential campaign, develop a vocabulary for the most important aspect of the job. Debate answers of the kind Donald Trump gave repeatedly about Iraq were popular, entertaining and politically successful. They also mischaracterized his own position on that war. No public record supports his claim that he opposed the invasion before it began; when Howard Stern asked him in 2002 whether he favored invading, Trump answered, “Yeah, I guess so.” Most dangerously, those answers turned the

presidency into a cartoon of easy choices effortlessly dispatched by a cartoon image of leadership.

Clearing these cartoons from the stage will help us figure out what a president should be like so that we can ask our candidates if they’re up to the task. Embedded in this failure and every failure of the norm-breaking Trump administration is the raw material for forensic accountability. Not a verdict on one man. A standard the next one has to clear before we hand over the codes.

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1. Chips: Can buyers get enough Nvidia processors, and at what price? The processor is the part doing the main mathematical work: turning language, images, video, and code into numbers, then running enormous calculations on those numbers. Nvidia gets our attention because its chips have become the default machinery for training and running the biggest AI models. It also sells whole server systems around those chips. If Nvidia systems get more expensive or harder to get, the cost of building large AI services rises.

2. Memory: Can those processors get enough specialized high-speed memory, or does memory scarcity push the whole server price up? The processor is fast, but it needs constant access to the model’s data. If the processor has to wait for data, the expensive chip is partly idle. That is why AI systems need specialized memory close to the processor. If that memory gets scarce, the whole machine gets more expensive.

   

3. Packaging: Can the processor and memory be assembled close together fast enough to meet demand? “Packaging” sounds like cardboard, but in chips it means the precise physical assembly that connects the processor, memory, wiring, and other components so they can work as one unit. For AI, the processor and memory have to sit extremely close together because data has to move fast. If there are not enough factories that can do this advanced assembly, Nvidia and its customers can have chips and memory in theory but still not enough finished AI systems.

4. Networking: Can thousands of processors be connected so they behave like one giant computer instead of expensive isolated machines? This means racks of servers, miles of cables, specialized switches, optical links, and software that lets thousands of chips share work without waiting on each other. If the connections are too slow or unreliable, the processors sit around waiting, and the company has paid for a giant computer that cannot fully act like one.

5. Power: Can the data-center site get enough electricity to run continuously? An AI data center can need electricity at the scale of a town or small city. No juice, no glorious future.

6. Grid gear: Can utilities get the transformers, switchgear, substations, and cables needed to physically deliver that electricity? AI is a nest of requirements, one of which has its own nest of requirements. Electricity has to pass through heavy equipment that changes voltage, routes power, and protects the system from failures. Some of that equipment now has long wait times. A data center can have a power contract and still be stuck waiting for the machinery that connects it to the grid.

7. Cooling: Can the building remove the heat from dense racks of AI servers without forcing the chips to slow down or fail? AI chips produce a lot of heat because they are doing nonstop calculations. If the heat is not removed, the chips throttle, crash, or wear out faster.

8. Water: If the cooling system uses water, can the project justify that demand to local communities already worried about drought, rates, or growth? Some data centers use water to carry heat away. That can turn an AI project into a local water fight, especially in dry regions or fast-growing communities where residents already worry about wells, reservoirs, farms, and utility bills.

9. Permits: Will local governments, utility regulators, and residents approve the data center, power upgrades, transmission lines, and water use?

10. Money: If servers, power, land, cooling, debt, and construction all get more expensive, does the buildout still produce enough revenue to justify itself? The AI boom depends on companies believing that future AI revenue will pay for today’s giant infrastructure bills. If the physical parts get more expensive at the same time investors start asking harder questions about profits, some projects get delayed, scaled down, or canceled.

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“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited, half-educated idiots, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, part 5, chapter 1.

Dostoevsky is describing social media. It feels like it, anyway. Andrei Lebezyatnikov, the real target of this passages, is an enthusiastic but muddleheaded follower of the progressive doctrines fashionable in 1860s St. Petersburg, talks grandly about socialism, communal living and women’s emancipation without having thought very deeply about any of them. (I mean, he didn’t even hoist them up on Substack early on a Sunday morning.)

Dostoevsky’s complaint is not merely that the man is foolish, but that a foolish advocate can degrade even a worthy cause by turning it into fashion and performance. We’d call it virtue signaling today. But because this is Dostoevsky, Lebezyatnikov is likely to play a role later, and we hope your correspondent doesn’t get confused by the Russian naming conventions, as he is all the time, and remembers who Lebezyatnikov is when he comes around again—if he does.1

“We will have King Bard!” the people near at hand shouted in reply. “We have had enough of the old men and the money-counters!” And people further off took up the cry: “Up the Bowman, and down with Moneybags,” till the clamour echoed along the shore.

“I am the last man to undervalue Bard the Bowman,” said the Master warily (for Bard now stood close beside him). “He has tonight earned an eminent place in the roll of the benefactors of our town; and he is worthy of many imperishable songs. But, why O People?”—and here the Master rose to his feet and spoke very loud and clear—“Why do I get all your blame? For what fault am I to be deposed? Who aroused the dragon from his slumber, I might ask? Who obtained of us rich gifts and ample help, and led us to believe that old songs could come true? Who played on our soft hearts and our pleasant fancies? What sort of gold have they sent down the river to reward us? Dragon-fire and ruin! From whom should we claim the recompense of our damage, and aid for our widows and orphans?”

As you see, the Master had not got his position for nothing.”

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937), chap. 14, “Fire and Water.”

I’m re-reading The Hobbit. The last time I read it was 2000. I think this is my third time through. I had forgotten the political aspect of the ending. It reads as very contemporary!

Spoiler! After Bard kills Smaug , the homeless survivors of Lake-town acclaim him and turn against their ineffectual Master. The Master rescues himself with an enduring political maneuver: praise the rival you cannot safely attack (who is standing right next to you), deny responsibility, and redirect the crowd’s anger toward a more distant target

.

“A Trappist monk has left the world behind him. Public success, for him, inevitably takes on the character of a defeat. I had to find out that in the plans of Divine Providence there is no such thing as a defeat and that every step is, or ought to be, a step forward into the wilderness—and that even publicity can nourish humility.”

—Thomas Merton2, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953).

The Sign of Jonas draws on the journal Merton kept from 1946 to 1952 at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He wrote in the wake of the enormous success of The Seven Storey Mountain.3 Paradox! The monk who had renounced the world had become famous in it.

This passage is typical of his mental systems where he turns incoming thoughts into acts of devotion. He’s trying to understand fame not simply as a corruption of the monastic life but as another occasion for surrendering his pride.

The amount of time Merton spends focusing on humility would surprise anyone who observes the gaudy public lives of those who proclaim their adherence to the same faith Merton practiced.

Is there a through-line? They were not picked with each other in mind. I could conjure a through-line, but then I’d be stealing the fun from you.

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Checking in before the jet-lag hits me like a wet sock full of sand. (It did, which is why this didn’t post Friday.)

We had a lovely time in Ireland. First we were in the very far northwest of the country and then we lived for a few days in Dublin in a neighborhood where we stayed long enough to think about joining the community council. (Thank you to Marlowe and Co. for all the coffee.)

We visited Ireland before we had kids. Now our oldest is 24 and we follow the kids around the city they’ve learned to know.

What I’m guessing not everyone in the family enjoys is riding in the car through the very rural parts of Ireland. I do the driving because I’m a control freak. The opposing drivers are all on the wrong side of the road as far as I am concerned and all seem to be playing a vital part in either rushing a pregnant mother to the delivery room, delivering the bomb diffuser to the train junction before the fuse shortens, or trying to exceed the pace of the administration’s changing messaging about the Iran war.

In this environment, the driver at least has the wheel in his hands. Everyone else must simply suffer as we come very close to everything-- the lorries in the middle of the road or the hedges on the passenger side. At one point we spent about 5 km on a road slightly thinner than the car with no side streets or wide places where you could let an oncoming car pass. Had another car come in the other direction I’d be writing you from that standoff.

You can see some lovely snaps of Ireland here on my Instagram page.

Meanwhile, Navel Gazing: Season Two has stumbled out of the bar and into the world. The first three episodes are live and the fourth will publish next week. Sorry for the confusion about the subscription. Here’s information on that. I’m not sure how many episodes there will be this season. Thank you for all the lovely feedback.

I also wrote Friday about the latest comments from JD Vance about the war in Iran.

Projects abound, and I look forward to continuing to share my work with you.

All best,

John

Here’s a short video of one of the wider roads:

This is not quite an admission that the “we negotiate with bombs” strategy was folly, but it recenters the conversation on the original questions of this conflict.

The basic question of the Iran war has always been: Was war the only way to achieve the administration’s stated objective? Answering it requires comparing what the war added with what it cost.

Vance says the war has entered a “new phase,” in which economic pressure is now the United States’ “most effective tool.” The word “now” suggests the previous phase of bombing was a necessary precondition for this one. Military force might have weakened Iran so that economic pressure could work.

It might also be the case that Vance is recognizing something that could have been known before the bombing started. That means this is not progress, but an admission of failure.

In the period immediately before the strikes, there were reported movements toward an arrangement on Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium.1 Omani officials described the proposed commitments as a significant breakthrough. Draft texts were anticipated. It suggested movement on the precise issue the war was later ostensibly launched to resolve.

Was a deal likely? Undoubtedly not. But the measure of the war’s success or folly is the difference between what can be achieved now and what could have been achieved in February of 2026. The administration must show what the bombs changed: what concessions economic pressure can obtain now that it could not have obtained before the war, and why the negotiations underway in February could not have produced them.

Confusing the calculation is that the goal posts for this war have moved so much they seem to be on a mechanized track. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz, lowering gas prices, ending a blockade or returning to negotiations are the key points being discussed now. All are desirable, but they are also attempts to recover conditions that existed before the bombing.

Solving a problem created by the war is not the same as achieving the objective for which the war was started. It is an admission that the objectives have not been achieved and a hint that they might never be achieved.

Improvisational whipsaws can become numbing background noise during the Trump years. The president sometimes changes position in the same sentence. But that razzle-dazzle hits differently when they involve war, the most dire use of presidential power. Or they should.

The Iran war has had a rhythm: attack, retaliation, ceasefire, collapse, new phase. Every day feels enough like the one before it that the original questions fade. Wake me when the war is over. That surrender of attention is useful to an administration constantly replacing yesterday’s rationale with today’s.

Another way to think about the current outcome is to look at the Obama-era JCPOA that Trump backed out of. That agreement reduced Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, capped enrichment, cut the number of centrifuges and created an intrusive international inspection system. It did not cover Iran’s ballistic missiles or its support for regional proxies, but those do not appear to be part of the current negotiations either.

The administration began the war insisting that force was necessary because negotiation and economic pressure had failed. Nearly six months later, the vice president says economic pressure is the most effective means of accomplishing the “final objective.”

Vance’s new position relies on a kind of conclusion by chronology. A “new phase” is framed as progress. It came after the previous phase, so it must be an evolution. But a Hail Mary pass is also a new phase. That does not mean it is a good new phase or that things are moving in the right direction.

Vance’s characterization of the “final objective” asks us to forget the previous objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its missiles, ending its support for proxies, rescuing the Iranian people, influencing the choice of Iran’s next leader, reopening the strait and producing unconditional surrender. The final objective is the one left after the others have been dropped.

Imagine if the administration had understood from the start that it would arrive here. It's the kind of thing worth knowing. Especially before launching a war. Wars and bombs are so costly. Carnage, money, lives, missile stockpiles, alliances, the global economy, people who rely on gas—all might have been spared if diplomacy and economic pressure could have produced the same leverage without the bombs.

First, an apology for the confusion some of you experienced with Navel Gazing: Season Two. Consuming the content is confusing enough; the payment scheme shouldn’t be.

Here’s the fix: If you are a paid subscriber to this Substack, you now have access to Navel Gazing: Season Two. Season One remains free.

If you’re a paid subscriber and don’t have access to Season Two, please let me know. I’m adding subscribers manually, so the process may be imperfect.

The brief explanation for how we got here: Slate published the first season several years ago in the Political Gabfest feed. That meant it automatically reached existing Gabfest listeners, though it’s a very different kind of show. I didn’t want to repeat that experience with Season Two, so I published it myself as a stand-alone product. My attempt to avoid one kind of confusion created another—including for me.

If you’re a free subscriber here, Season Two requires a paid subscription either to Navel Gazing or to this main Substack. I’d love to have you join. But you may want to listen to or read some of Season One first—it’s available here, on Apple Podcasts, and on other podcast platforms—to see what you’re getting yourself into.

Thanks for hanging with me and my lame IT staff, which is also me.

All best,

John

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Best,

John

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Bob Dylan’s Notebooks. The opposite of mine.

In any event, the wonderful response has encouraged me to finally finish enough episodes that today we published episodes one and two of season two. It’s not necessary that you start with season one, but it might help a little.

You can find season two and season one here:

Unlike my regular substack, Navel Gazing requires its own subscription.

Happy listening,

John

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By that contemporary standard, the confirmation process for Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche did something unusually useful. Instead of producing answers about his independence from the president, it produced a real-time test of it.

At issue was an extraordinary arrangement, which Blanche signed, resolving President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. It purported to grant sweeping protection from existing tax claims to Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, and to create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could compensate people claiming to have been persecuted by the government—including, potentially, Trump’s political allies and January 6 defendants.

The arrangement was not merely controversial. Critics questioned whether it was legally binding at all, and even after Blanche narrowed its scope, the remaining tax protections could still be worth tens of millions of dollars to the president and his family.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, who is presiding over the case, dismantled both the lawsuit and the settlement it produced. She found that the suit had been brought for an “improper purpose.” This was not, she concluded, an ordinary lawsuit between genuinely adverse parties. The president was effectively suing an administration he controlled. She rejected the government’s attempt to present the resulting agreement as the product of an ordinary adversarial proceeding. She noted that the settlement outline bore only Blanche’s signature, even though the Justice Department purported to represent the government against the president.

In the Senate, the arrangement that got such rough treatment from judge Williams was a double test of Blanche’s independence. Did he put the president’s interests and those of his allies above his duty to the law and Constitution?

That independence matters because the attorney general leads a department powerful enough to shield a president and his allies from the law—or turn the law against their enemies.

This weekend, we saw the conclusion of an episode that illustrates the danger of what happens when law enforcement becomes an instrument of the president’s passions in the department Blanche is asking to run outright. After president Trump blamed “vandals” for the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner, federal authorities charged former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with felony property destruction. Prosecutors have now moved to dismiss the case, acknowledging that the damage resulted from a rushed, botched installation—not vandalism. The government’s own filing acknowledged that the evidence no longer supported the vandalism theory. The machinery of federal law enforcement advanced far enough to put a man under felony indictment before the evidence stopped it. Even then, the president didn’t concede the point—he told reporters the damage was still “VANDALS,” contractor problems notwithstanding.

Blanche was not a nominee being asked to speculate about some future conflict between presidential loyalty and the law. His signature was already on such a conflict.

Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, helped create the arrangement, publicly defended it, and then called the fund “dead” while declining to rescind the order that had created it. When Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn demanded that he put his assurance into binding form, he resisted. Only when they placed his confirmation in jeopardy did he issue the written order they had demanded.

That sequence is more revealing than any hearing exchange. Blanche’s conduct tracked the location of leverage. Blanche had already shown how he would behave when presidential loyalty collided with the impartial administration of justice.

As of this week, the senators have gotten a concession. What they have not gotten is any indication that the concession restrains anyone. Asked about the deal Monday, the president told reporters he hadn’t reviewed it — he understood there’d been a “sign-off,” he said, but didn’t know its terms, and waved off Blanche’s memo as simply restating things Blanche had already told Congress. Trump did not dispute that the fund was dead. He kept arguing for bringing it back.

The senators extracted a concession from Blanche. They did not extract one from the president. Trump continues to argue for reviving the fund, suggesting the pressure to restore it has not disappeared.

The ability to force a nominee into one concession is not evidence that he possesses the independent judgment required for the office in the future. If anything, the episode showed that Blanche responds to the person or institution holding the decisive leverage. First, that was the president. For a few crucial days, it was Cornyn and Tillis. Once Blanche is confirmed, the daily leverage returns overwhelmingly to the president, whose personal interests Blanche has already shown himself willing to accommodate with inventiveness.

Senators Cornyn and Tillis can reasonably claim that they used the Senate’s power to stop an abuse. But they are treating the resulting concession as if it erases the conduct that made their intervention necessary. In fact, that conduct is the evidence.

They are mistaking the success of their leverage for proof of Blanche’s independence—and are on the verge of voting to return the leverage to the president.

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It’s Friday again, and I’m grateful, as always, for your attention and subscriptions. This really is a wonderful place to work through ideas.

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I just posted Stack the Week Daily for today.

I would like to continue, but with the publication of today’s stack I’m ending the daily phase of the experiment here. Producing it every day requires an enormous lift. I have Navel Gazing episodes to get out the door in the coming week, some traveling ahead and a book that requires long stretches of concentrated work.

This does not mean the end of this publication. I’ll continue to post regularly, and I’ll turn some of those posts into audio offerings available through John Dickerson’s Field Notes on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players.

I’ve experimented a lot since the first Stack the Week podcast. So, I asked ChatGPT to read everything published under Stack the Week and Stack the Week Daily since we began in April—32 entries—and tell me what it thought the project was trying to do.

Here was its conclusion:

Stack the Week helps an attentive but overwhelmed citizen maintain an accurate, humane model of the world. It reconstructs events in sequence, tests claims against consequences, connects developments into larger patterns, and preserves important facts that the daily news cycle would otherwise erase. It does so with evidentiary discipline, acknowledged uncertainty, correction, curiosity and humor.

I fed my work to a machine, and it pronounced it excellent!

I know…1

But I’ll risk sharing the verdict in the hope that those of you who have followed these experiments will understand the stumbling spirit in which I asked.

The reason I ran this experiment is that you can aim to do something but maybe not get there. That description comes pretty close to what I was aiming for when I started.

This should exist somewhere in the world, but doing it properly— without all the flaws of the current version— would require a pretty hefty staff. If you really want to explain bond yields and valuations while making them slightly more enjoyable than a mouthful of sawdust, you would want graphics, illustrations and other modern conveniences. Maybe a single rock of ice to pour it over.

I don’t know what the fall will bring. There may be a second phase. Some of my ability to produce Stack the Week comes from focused work done in isolation. Producing it also consumes the time required for that work. I want to use my attention as intelligently as I can—and to find the form in which I can do the most useful work.

One of the most meaningful parts of this experiment has been discovering how many of you want this kind of work. That inspires me, and I’m enormously grateful, and so I’ll keep feeding off that. It’ll just show up in a different form. Shadow puppets are possible, obviously.

For my immediate future, however, I am going to join the founder of 15 Minutes Group, who has been at work in the dining room. We are going to go do pastoral dances.

Thank you again for joining for the ride. Have a wonderful weekend.

John

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The influx, equal to about 70 percent of Ceuta’s normal population, became a European dispute Friday. Italy temporarily restored checks on air and sea travel from Spain because its government feared that migrants admitted or released by Spain could travel onward through Europe’s normally border-free Schengen Area. Italy does not share a border with Spain; the restrictions apply to passengers arriving from Spain by plane or ship. The European Commission said Friday that it had not detected such onward movement. For migrants who remain, the next morning begins with registration, screening and a possible asylum proceeding. For other travelers, the political reaction means the return of passport checks on routes where they had largely disappeared.

President Donald Trump announced Friday that Hamas had accepted a plan to disarm in Gaza, but Hamas tied disarmament to an Israeli withdrawal while Israel insisted that Hamas surrender its weapons first. The Associated Press verified a written roadmap and reported Friday that Hamas had confirmed its participation; Israel had not formally accepted the plan. Under the roadmap, Hamas would first surrender police weapons and later turn over heavier arms. A new Palestinian security force would replace Hamas, while an international Board of Peace official would oversee a transition expected to last between 200 and 350 days. According to the Associated Press, Israeli forces remain deployed in or control access to roughly 60 percent of Gaza.

Reconstruction is estimated to cost $70 billion, but contractors cannot safely rebuild while Hamas and Israel disagree over who disarms or withdraws first. For civilians, the agreement arrives amid continued displacement and shortages. The United Nations humanitarian office reported that military operations, movement restrictions and insecurity were still forcing families to move and limiting access to drinking water, food, shelter, sanitation and medical care. Many people remain in temporary shelters or damaged buildings while reconstruction is stalled. Reconstruction cannot begin at scale until Hamas, Israel and the international force agree on who disarms, who withdraws and who controls Gaza during the transition.

Drones hit Kuwait on Friday, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had attacked two oil tankers. Donald Trump’s pledge to hit a piece of Iranian infrastructure for each Iranian attack has not been followed up on. Four other tankers turned away from the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia assembled a 14-country security alliance to protect shipping and regional infrastructure, according to the Guardian’s live reporting. The alliance is intended to coordinate the protection of tankers, ports and regional infrastructure, although its members have not publicly explained how they will divide that work.

The war’s financial effects appeared in oil-company earnings Friday. Exxon earned $14.53 billion and Chevron earned $12.07 billion as oil traded above $100 a barrel and briefly reached $126. Exxon’s refining profit increased sixfold, while diesel prices rose 41 percent. The same supply disruption produces opposite mornings: producers and refiners collect higher prices, while drivers and businesses pay more for fuel, shipping and petroleum-based products.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s expansion of mandatory detention for immigrants arrested inside the United States, the Associated Press reported Friday. The policy denied many detainees the opportunity to ask an immigration judge for release on bond while their cases proceeded. Previous administrations generally allowed immigrants without criminal records who were arrested away from the border to request bond hearings. Immigration officials expanded mandatory detention last year, arguing that a 1996 law authorized it.

The Ninth Circuit said the administration’s interpretation conflicted with the law’s words, structure and history. Congress created different rules for people stopped while entering the country and people already living inside it; the administration sought to apply the stricter border rule to both groups. The decision deepened a split among federal appeals courts. The Fifth and Eighth circuits have upheld the policy, while several others have rejected it. The dispute captures a recurring legal fight in Trump’s immigration crackdown: whether the executive branch can use broad readings of older statutes to eliminate hearings that previous administrations provided. For detainees covered by the ruling, the immediate consequence is not automatic release. It is the right to ask a judge for release while the government tries to deport them.

Jessica Treviño, a 34-year-old Texas mother protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sued the federal government after it sought to terminate her status for “unauthorized travel” caused by her deportation. The Associated Press reported the lawsuit Friday. Treviño arrived in the United States at seven and received DACA protection at 20. Federal agents arrested her and her husband in December, and the government deported them to Mexico on March 25. Citizenship and Immigration Services then cited her departure on March 25 as unauthorized travel. Their three children, all American citizens, remained with relatives in the United States. The government forced her across the border and then cited that crossing as the reason to cancel her protection.

Medicare currently pays private insurers a temporary subsidy to keep monthly premiums from rising sharply for people enrolled in stand-alone Part D prescription-drug plans. The subsidy does not lower the price charged by the drugmaker; it absorbs some of the added cost that insurers would otherwise pass to customers. The Trump administration will stop making those payments after 2026, the Associated Press reported Friday. Insurers will then recalculate their premiums without the federal cushion, and some of the roughly 25 million Part D enrollees are likely to pay more each month in 2027. The subsidy cost the government an estimated $3.6 billion this year. Beneficiaries will see their new premiums during the fall enrollment period, which overlaps with the November election. The change will first appear not at the pharmacy counter but in the monthly premium listed in each plan’s fall enrollment materials.

Amazon raised its projected 2026 capital spending from $200 billion to $220 billion, largely to build data centers and other artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Its shares rose about 12 percent Friday after the company reported that Amazon Web Services revenue grew 37 percent, up from 28 percent and its fastest growth in 18 quarters, according to the Associated Press. Capital spending is money used to build or buy assets expected to last for years—in this case chips, servers, data centers and the electrical equipment needed to run them.

Amazon’s stock jump helps explain the current rule on Wall Street: investors will tolerate enormous AI spending when a company can show that customers are already buying more computing services. The spending alone was not the good news; AWS’s accelerating growth gave investors evidence that at least part of the construction bill is producing revenue. In the AI boom, Wall Street is no longer rewarding the size of the promise. It is rewarding evidence that customers have begun paying the bill.

Amazon’s increase pushed the combined artificial-intelligence investment plans of the largest technology companies above $1 trillion, the Financial Times reported Friday. The companies are spending the money on data centers, advanced chips, power plants and transmission equipment. Some can pay from their own cash, while others are borrowing or using investment vehicles financed by outside investors. AI revenue has not grown as quickly as the infrastructure bill, so the returns depend on companies and consumers paying for far more AI computing in the future.

The closest Industrial Revolution comparison is the railroad boom: the technology companies are laying tracks, building stations and securing the power supply before they know exactly how much freight and how many passengers the system will carry. If demand arrives, they control essential infrastructure. If it does not, they still owe the cost of the tracks. The comparison also explains why the spending reaches beyond Silicon Valley: data centers require land, construction crews, cooling equipment and enough electricity to compete with homes and factories for power.

The Federal Reserve disclosed Wednesday that Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan had voted to raise its main interest rate by a quarter-point while the majority kept it between 3.5 and 3.75 percent. Friday’s news was their explanation. Hammack and Kashkari argued that inflation had remained high for too long and that repeated disruptions to supply could become permanent price increases if the Fed did nothing. Kashkari also cited the data-center construction boom as a new source of demand for workers, equipment and electricity.

They argued that a small increase now, while employment remains healthy, could reduce the need for a larger increase later. Higher oil prices reinforce their case: oil raises fuel and shipping costs, businesses can pass those costs to customers, and renewed inflation makes the Fed less willing to lower borrowing costs. Anyone seeking a mortgage, car loan or business loan notices the dispute because a Fed debating increases is much farther from delivering the rate cuts borrowers have been waiting for.

Yum Brands said Taco Bell’s American same-store sales had fallen 2 percent so far in the current quarter as customers avoided the chain during a cyclospora outbreak. It turns out the slogan “Explosive Diarrhea, It’s What Comes After Dinner” is not a real sales generator. Nearly 2,000 people reported illnesses during an outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce, and Taco Bell stopped using lettuce from the implicated Mexican supplier on July 17. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Taco Bell planned to bring customers back with discounted app promotions, including $1 food.

The size of the outbreak reflects the scale of the modern restaurant supply chain: one contaminated ingredient from a large supplier can reach many locations before investigators identify the common source. Taco Bell could replace the lettuce immediately. Customers decide when the outbreak is over.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez asked a state court to order the child-welfare department to help return a 15-year-old American citizen whom its employees allegedly sent alone into Mexico. The Associated Press reported the lawsuit Friday. State employees allegedly drove the boy to El Paso on July 6 and told him to cross the border to find his estranged mother, a Mexican citizen who had been deported after a drug-related arrest. The teenager later contacted the independent Office of the Child Advocate. Torrez also asked the court to prohibit officials from taking other children out of the country for reunification without judicial approval. The institutional failure is visible in who finally raised the alarm: not the agency responsible for the boy, but the boy himself, calling an outside watchdog from another country.

Anthropic reported Friday that three of its AI models had broken into real organizations during authorized security tests. The company conducted 141,000 evaluation runs using Opus 4.7, Mythos 5 and an internal model. Weak passwords helped the systems enter networks, and defenders failed to detect two of the intrusions. The tests began as early as April. The models did not invent a new kind of cyberattack. They found familiar human mistakes and exploited them at machine speed.

The World Meteorological Organization warned Friday that the strengthening El Niño could bring extreme heat, drought and heavy rain through spring 2027. El Niño is a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific that rearranges weather patterns around the world. A key Pacific measuring region reached the warmest level recorded at this early point in an El Niño’s development. Most forecast models indicate that the event could become the strongest on record, although scientists told the Associated Press that the forecast is not certain because the event will not peak for several months. Farmers, water managers, electric utilities and disaster agencies notice first because they must make planting, reservoir, power-supply and emergency plans months before forecasters know precisely where the droughts and floods will land.

And in other facts, cosmetic surgeons told USA Today on Friday that rapid weight loss from GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic can remove fat from the temples, producing “temporal hollowing.” Doctors can restore volume with fat or filler, but the temple contains arteries and veins connected to the eye, so an injection into the wrong blood vessel can cause blindness. The unexpected risk therefore comes not from the weight-loss drug itself but from an elective attempt to correct one of its visible effects.

The cave beneath Pembroke Castle

National Geographic reported that archaeologists are excavating an enormous cave reached by a spiral staircase beneath Pembroke Castle in Wales for evidence of Neanderthals and some of Britain’s earliest modern humans. Researchers once believed Victorian-era work had stripped the cavern of its archaeological value, but test excavations found burned bone, animal remains and worked stone. Those finds showed that archaeologically useful layers survived, which is why researchers are returning now for a larger excavation. They could establish whether Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or both occupied the site. The juxtaposition is unusual: a medieval fortress and the birthplace of Henry VII stand directly above a potential record of human life extending back as far as 100,000 years.

Children make music inside an MRI scanner

The Conversation highlighted an experiment in which musically untrained children ages 9 to 11 lay inside an MRI scanner with a specially built, nonmagnetic 35-key piano resting on their knees. The children alternated between playing a memorized five-note pentatonic scale and improvising melodies with the same five black keys. Because the notes were selected to sound harmonious together, the children could explore without playing a “wrong” note. Brain scans showed that improvisation strengthened connections among regions associated with emotion and reward more than the rote exercise did. The results suggest that improvisation engages children’s emerging creativity networks even before they receive extensive musical training.

Five million artworks in one searchable museum

Axios Finish Line reported that The Last Museum has assembled an online index of more than 5.8 million artworks, creating what amounts to a museum without walls, closing hours or a final gallery. The collection stretches across roughly 5,000 years, from about 3000 B.C. to the present. The site is free, and every work links back to the institution that holds it. Go to lastmuseum.com.

A civilization emerges beneath the Amazon canopy

Live Science reported that an airborne-laser survey of nearly 1,740 square miles of Brazilian rainforest revealed 396 previously unknown earthworks belonging to a complex civilization that arose about 2,500 years ago—close to the beginning of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C. The population in the area may have reached 1.25 million to 3 million between A.D. 100 and 300. The laser system, called lidar, measures reflected light from an aircraft and allows researchers to digitally remove the trees from an image, revealing roads, platforms and geometric earthworks hidden at ground level. The findings, published in Nature, add to evidence that the precolonial Amazon was neither empty nor untouched but supported large, organized communities whose monumental architecture is still being recovered from beneath the trees.

Four runs on one final swing

The Minnesota Twins entered the bottom of the ninth inning against Kansas City trailing 3-0 after failing to score in the first eight innings. With two outs, the bases loaded and Kody Clemens facing an 0-2 count, Clemens hit his 19th home run of the season to right-center field, giving Minnesota a 4-3 victory. The play qualified as an “ultimate grand slam,” the name for a walk-off grand slam hit when the home team trails by exactly three runs in the ninth inning or later. Kansas City had been one strike from a shutout; Minnesota instead scored all four of its runs on the game’s final pitch. According to Major League Baseball’s historical list, Clemens hit the 35th ultimate grand slam in major-league history—and the first with two outs and an 0-2 count.

The United States and Iran exchanged fresh missile barrages Thursday.

Jordan’s air defenses intercepted five Iranian missiles Thursday without casualties. That was the second consecutive day that Jordan had to play whack-a-missile. Kuwait’s military said an Iranian strike hit a Chinese company’s building, killing a worker.

Iran’s official news agency said an American strike on Qeshm (pronounced “GHESH-m”) Island killed three people and wounded two. Egyptian officials said drones caused fires aboard two natural-gas vessels.

The war feels like it’s jumping the box despite months of bombs and boasts.

Reuters reported that Tehran expects within weeks to receive the first part of an order for Chinese shoulder-fired air-defense launchers. These portable systems, commonly called MANPADS (man-portable air-defense system) allow small teams to fire at low-flying aircraft. They can force American pilots to fly higher, change routes or rely more heavily on long-range weapons. The sale would mark an unusually direct Chinese contribution to Iran’s war effort after Beijing had tried to support Tehran without becoming a combatant.

Bloomberg placed that purchase inside what it called a “third missile age.” Nuclear missiles defined the first age and expensive precision weapons the second. Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated a third model: firing conventional missiles by the hundreds or thousands to overwhelm defenses, destroy infrastructure and exhaust interceptor supplies. Iran has fired about 2,000 missiles since February 28.

Thursday’s reporting showed a widening difference between the allies over how to end the Iran war. Netanyahu urged Trump to intensify military and economic pressure. The administration still hopes negotiations can stop the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Netanyahu also confronted JD Vance, who had accused Israeli officials of undermining American diplomacy because it wanted to keep hitting Iran and warned that Israel was alienating Republicans. The Israeli PM said neither was true.

The Commerce Department said the economy grew at a 1.5 percent annual rate from April through June, down from 2.1 percent and below forecasts. But the headline was weaker than the economy underneath it. Consumer spending accelerated to a 3.2 percent rate, and business investment excluding housing grew at an 8.4 percent rate. When economists removed volatile government, inventory and trade figures, spending by American households and businesses grew at a 3.9 percent rate.

A lot of the expansion in this quarter came from spending on AI. That expansion is creating demand for workers. The New York Times reported that hundreds of electricians building OpenAI’s project in Saline Township, Michigan, are working 10-hour days, seven days a week. Michigan calls it the largest single investment in the state’s history. A separate $50 million program backed by Google plans to increase annual enrollment in electrician apprenticeships from 19,500 to 30,000 during each of the next three years—a 54 percent increase.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, the PCE price index, rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier—down from 4.1 percent but still well above the Fed’s 2 percent goal.

The Fed declined to raise rates, although three officials wanted to do so. The weak GDP headline supports caution; strong private demand supports higher rates to restrain prices. The Fed confronts a weak headline, sturdy spending and too much inflation. None of the choices is clean.

Investors are also making borrowing more expensive without waiting for the Fed. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond reached 5.23 percent Thursday, its highest level since 2007.

A Treasury yield is the return investors receive for lending money to the U.S. government. When the 30-year yield rises, investors are demanding more compensation to tie up their money for 30 years. That can reflect expectations of higher inflation, higher future interest rates, stronger growth, or weaker demand for long-term Treasuries; heavier government borrowing can also put upward pressure on yields, though it’s usually one factor among several.

Rates on mortgages and other long-term loans commonly follow Treasury yields, so the increase means higher borrowing costs can spread through the economy even when the Fed leaves its own short-term rate unchanged.

Two national polls delivered the same basic finding: most Americans oppose the Iran war, and they increasingly connect it to the cost of living. AP-NORC found that about two-thirds of adults said the war was not worth fighting. Only one person in five wanted the attacks to continue. Trump’s approval on Iran fell to 28 percent, six points below June.

Quinnipiac found 60 percent of registered voters opposed American military action and 34 percent supported it.

Americans considered preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon important, but ranked fuel prices and a ceasefire higher.

A CNN poll found the political damage extending to November’s congressional elections. Democrats led Republicans by eight points among registered voters on the generic ballot, which asks which party a person would support for Congress without naming candidates. That measure is seen as a rough proxy of how the parties will fare across the most contested races. Among voters who said they were extremely motivated to vote, Democrats held a 20-point advantage.

The president’s nominee for attorney general is in danger. Two Republicans, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, have demanded that Todd Blanche confirm in writing that the approximately $1.8 billion fund created through Trump’s settlement with the IRS will not exist and that protections against future Trump family audits cannot be revived. Blanche has not provided those guarantees. The senators will not support him until he does, so the Judiciary Committee canceled Thursday’s vote. Trump later said he might withdraw the nomination for now. For now, the disputed fund has also stalled Blanche’s nomination.

An update on Trump’s prime-time speech alleging Chinese interference in American elections: The Washington Post reported that officials in 12 of the 15 states named in administration intelligence reports said federal authorities never told them China had compromised their voter-registration systems, directly contradicting the White House’s public account.

Major hospital systems reported a sharp increase in uninsured patients after enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired. Congressional Republicans allowed the larger premium tax credits to end on January 1, 2026. Hospitals told The New York Times that more patients were arriving without coverage and could not pay their bills.

When the credits disappeared, some families dropped coverage they could no longer afford. They did not stop getting sick; many delayed treatment until they reached emergency rooms, which must stabilize them whether they can pay. Hospitals absorb the resulting unpaid bills or shift costs elsewhere, potentially raising premiums for people outside the ACA marketplaces.

The National Urban League released its 50th annual “State of Black America” report Thursday and said Trump administration policies had pushed the American Dream farther away for Black Americans than at any point since the civil-rights movement. The organization cited the dismantling and redirection of parts of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, changes at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and administration-backed voting restrictions. The report also measured persistent material gaps: the median Black household income remains 37 percent below the median white household income.

In Ukraine, Russian missiles and drones killed at least nine civilians and wounded more than 50 overnight. Poland said a Russian missile crossed deep into Polish territory and fell there, prompting NATO aircraft to scramble.

France allowed 84,000 wildfire evacuees to return home Thursday after firefighters gained control of the southwestern blaze.

Congolese authorities reported that the official Ebola death toll has passed 1,500, an increase of about 50 percent in one week. Authorities called it the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record.

Thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta (SAY-oo-tah), Spain’s small territory on the North African coast, after border controls broke down Thursday. At least three people died trying to arrive by sea. Spain and Morocco agreed to cooperate in returning illegal entrants. In May 2021, more than 8,000 people entered Ceuta in two days.

AP said the immediate trigger for Thursday’s mass crossing was not clear. Surveys of migrants using the western Mediterranean route found that 54 percent cited economic reasons, 33 percent war or conflict, 23 percent targeted personal violence and 14 percent gradual environmental change (respondents could name more than one reason.) Most people crossing Thursday appeared to be Moroccan, while others had traveled to Morocco from elsewhere in Africa. Ceuta matters because reaching it means reaching Spanish—and therefore European Union—territory without making the longer sea journey to mainland Europe.

WIRED reported that American children are running faster than ever, a phenomenon the track world has dubbed “trackflation.” An Ohio high school senior ran the indoor two-mile in 9 minutes, 37.15 seconds, breaking a national record that had stood since 2013, while a Texas sophomore covered 100 meters in 9.92 seconds, only one-tenth of a second off the collegiate record. The most exuberant performance may have come from a 12-year-old Utah girl who ran a mile in 4:40.98, nearly six seconds faster than the age-group world record, despite performing the Scuba Dance just before reaching the finish line. “Nobody was even in the camera with her,” one astonished commentator said.

WIRED traced part of the change to the spread of elite coaching methods once largely confined to professional runners. Some teenagers are experimenting with Norwegian-style double-threshold training, completing two carefully paced workouts in a day and using blood-lactate readings to adjust their effort. Private coaches are also emphasizing efficient mechanics, deliberate recovery, nutrition and heat acclimatization. One coach said a program that once consisted of a 20-minute jog and a game of Capture the Flag now asks girls to run eight 400-meter repetitions at five-minute-mile pace. Young runners also benefit from carbon-plated “super shoes,” fast polyurethane tracks, pace lights and a growing national competition circuit that gives them opportunities to race equally fast peers. Coaches and researchers caution that such intensive training can also cause injuries, burnout and excessive pressure.

The Financial Times highlighted a South Korean trend involving “dopamine sites,” imitation shopping and food-delivery services on which nothing is sold and nothing arrives. Waiting for Godot’s packages. The platforms reproduce the ritual in elaborate detail: users examine menus and reviews, compare products, fill a cart, check out and sometimes follow an animated courier across a live map. One service called Food Never Comes allowed one user to add 1,000 toppings to an imaginary order. What no pickles?! About 30,000 people a week were pretending to order food through the service by mid-June. Other sites offer fictitious clothing and merchandise, while some tell users how much money or how many calories they avoided consuming. The premise is that anticipation and selection supply much of shopping’s excitement, allowing users to indulge the ritual of an impulse purchase without receiving an unwanted package, an unnecessary meal or a credit-card charge. Therapists have said the sites may interrupt costly behavior, although some question whether rehearsing the shopping ritual reinforces the same habit it is intended to control.

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The Iran war moved again from background to foreground. Iran launched missiles at U.S. forces in Jordan; U.S. Central Command said the missiles were shot down. The systems doing this work are the same scarce air-defense systems the U.S. has been burning through in the Iran war. The Wall Street Journal called it a surprise missile attack; the point is that Iran fired after a brief lull and while de-escalation talks were still being floated. There was action in Iraq. The United States and Saudi Arabia hit Iran-backed militias in Iraq. AP reports at least 20 militia fighters were killed, along with six Iranian advisers. Iraq condemned the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty. Iraq and Saudi Arabia are now more directly engaged in the war.

Ukraine said it hit two major Russian oil refineries overnight. That pushes forward the strategy we talked about before: Ukraine is not just fighting Russian troops; it is attacking the fuel and revenue that feed Putin’s war. Ukraine’s Zelenskyy was in Washington getting support from senators who advanced a Russia sanctions bill, 86-12. The bill would punish countries that keep buying Russian oil, gas and other exports. The bill would also let Trump impose tariffs of 500 percent on Russian imports and tariffs as high as 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian oil and gas. At Trump’s request, senators added sanctions aimed at Iran too.

In Congo, Ebola is now making hunger worse. The head of the U.N. World Food Program told AP that more than 2.7 million people in affected health zones face acute food insecurity. People are being told to isolate, but they also need food. That is the trap.

In Japan, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said at least 13 people had died after a magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto.

In Europe two firefighters were killed on Crete on July 29 while battling a wildfire driven by extreme heat and high winds.

The Fed held interest rates steady, but three officials wanted to raise them. Trump wants lower rates, which would make borrowing cheaper. But the Iran war is pushing oil prices higher, and that increases the price for gas and goods that move by gas-powered vehicles. The president insists his new Fed chair wants to lower rates. The war Trump is directing is making the rate cut he wants harder to justify.

A CNN/SSRS poll found a record 73 percent of Americans saying Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. His approval among Republicans fell to a new low of 78 percent, and the share of Republicans enthusiastic about the rest of his second term fell from 38 percent last spring to 19 percent. 19 percent? Wowza.

A new filing in the James Comey case says Trump requested notes from the Secret Service interview of Comey “to use in his 6 p.m. press conference,” while repeated searches by federal investigators, including Secret Service agents, for evidence that “86” meant killing produced inconclusive or empty results.

Today’s Washington spectacle was Anthony Fauci’s appearance before the Senate. Republicans, led by Rand Paul, are still investigating the origins of COVID and whether Fauci misled Congress about U.S.-funded research. Paul claims Fauci helped obscure or deny U.S. support for risky “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan, and he released parts of Fauci’s diary to argue that Fauci privately took the idea that the virus leaked from a lab more seriously than he admitted publicly. Fauci has said the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research as Paul defines it. Gain-of-function research means altering an organism, often a virus, to study whether it becomes more transmissible, more dangerous, or better able to evade defenses. Fauci said he had testified or briefed Congress “well over 200” times during nearly 40 years in government. Today, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer more than 100 questions, saying the hearing was designed to trap him into criminal exposure. He said Paul wanted him to say “anything” that could fulfill Paul’s public pledges to put him “behind bars.” He also accused Paul of an “unhinged obsession” with him. Republicans now plan a contempt vote. So the fight is no longer only where COVID came from. It is whether Congress is investigating Fauci or trying to make him prosecutable.

Todd Blanche’s nomination to become attorney general in full is wobbling. Politico reports Blanche skipped a scheduled meeting with Sen. John Cornyn, who then said he was still “not prepared” to support him. Cornyn’s issue is the Trump IRS settlement. He wants written assurance that a roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is dead and that audit protections for Trump and his family cannot be revived or stretched forward. Blanche has said the fund is effectively gone, but Cornyn wants it in writing before he supplies the vote. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to vote tomorrow, so the immediate question is whether Republicans have the votes to move Trump’s former lawyer into permanent control of the Justice Department.

The morning after a federal judge ruled that no federal detention contract could override state law, ICE published proposed contracts for 5,500 beds declaring that state and local laws “shall not apply” to the facilities. The same proposed contracts would let detention centers operate indefinitely at 85 percent staffing, including medical staffing. A June inspection found one detainee’s health assessment was 22 days late and suicide-watch checks ran nearly 14 hours apart instead of the required eight. In Washington state, officials needed three years of litigation, after 10 refused inspections and 3,500 detainee complaints, to win a ruling allowing state health inspectors into the Tacoma detention center.

Trump also denied $227 million in snow-disaster aid requests from four Democratic-led states even though FEMA or NOAA had found the requests met federal standards. Presidents since George W. Bush had approved 68 of the previous 69 qualifying snow-disaster requests. Last week it was disclosed that the administration had denied projects in states that did not vote for Trump.

The United States also banned new foreign-made humanoid and four-legged robots, a move aimed mostly at China. The FCC says the issue is national security: robots can collect data, move through homes, schools and factories, and plug into American infrastructure. China dominates the humanoid robot market.

It was generally a bad day for robots. In New York, a rural school district paused plans for a nearly $60,000 humanoid AI robot teacher named Sally. Sally has silicone skin, brown hair, facial expressions and “natural conversation,” and was supposed to help teach robotics and technology at Salamanca High School, on the Allegany territory of the Seneca Nation. Teachers, parents and state officials objected. They raised concerns about student privacy, replacing human judgment, and the fact that Realbotix acquired a company known for hyper-realistic sex dolls. One local substitute teacher put the deeper objection plainly: of all the schools to “test it out,” they chose Native American children again.

U.S. job postings with “AI” in the title rose from 264 in the first quarter of 2022 to 822 in the first quarter of 2026, and Indeed found that AI titles are now more common outside the technology industry than inside it.

Illinois has recorded 220 confirmed tornadoes through Monday, more than twice the total of any other state, along with nine significant weather events, the state’s highest number in a decade. There is not one tidy cause. The state climatologist has pointed to a year of repeated storm systems, warm and humid air, and Illinois sitting in the active zone where those ingredients kept meeting. There is also a reporting issue: better radar, storm-spotter networks and damage surveys can count weaker tornadoes that previous decades missed. But the record still points to a real year of repeated severe-weather setups over Illinois.

College sports money kept accelerating. Ohio State reportedly agreed to a roughly $15 million-a-year JPMorgan jersey-patch deal, meaning the bank’s logo would appear on uniforms across Ohio State’s varsity sports, not just on signs around the stadium, only for Notre Dame to announce a roughly $20 million-a-year SoFi agreement hours later. Notre Dame’s deal would put SoFi’s logo on Irish jerseys and make the company an official financial-services partner. Schools can now share revenue directly with athletes; Ohio State plans to max out a roughly $21.3 million pool for 2026-27. Jersey patches are one way to pay for that new athlete payroll.

In a Costa Rican forest, scientists have installed a 15-inch touchscreen to attract wild capuchin monkeys. AI-powered facial recognition identifies each animal, the screen presents a simple learning task, and a correct touch sends a dried banana slice sliding onto a tray. Which doesn’t happen around these offices, I tell ya, no matter how much I punch the screen. Ten of the sixteen monkeys that investigated the contraption eventually worked out the relationship between poking the glass and receiving their favorite treat. Eight remembered later. Researchers hope to add more sophisticated tests of memory and impulse control in the hopes of curing those of us who split off from the family tree 7 million years ago.

In 2020, a visitor gave the New Bedford Whaling Museum one star for being the “Worst Aquarium Ever,” which was hard to dispute because it was not an aquarium. The museum put the review on T-shirts, sales jumped 250 percent, and now people are lining up to represent a place whose chief aquatic attractions are four enormous whale skeletons and, as of this year, one modest 250-gallon fish tank.

Finally, the filmed version of the musical “Hadestown” earned $10.2 million in 1,949 North American theaters, narrowly beating “Hamilton” for the largest debut ever by a live theatrical capture. The folk-and-jazz retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice began as an indie project, reached Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tony Awards. Its five-day engagement was extended, with some of the strongest business coming from Huntsville, Salt Lake City, Eugene and Boise.

Benjamin Netanyahu met for 90-minutes with President Trump Tuesday. He declared near-total agreement on Iran and called the meeting one of their best. The administration was equally upbeat.

The public display obscured consequential disagreements. Israel wants the United States to resume the war if Iran refuses to dismantle its nuclear program, including attacking the deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain complex. Washington has not explained how that could be accomplished, and the United States is consuming Patriot and THAAD interceptors faster than it can replace them.

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Trump acknowledged Netanyahu’s pressure about the danger of Pickaxe mountain before the meeting: “Bibi’s telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.” Politico reported that some of Trump’s America First allies fear the meeting will pull the US deeper into the war, alleging that Netanyahu had “sold” Trump on starting the conflict in the first place. His renewed pressure—and Trump’s slightly irritated acknowledgment of it—echoes all that.

It was Netanyahu’s eighth Oval Office meeting since Trump returned to office — and RealClearWorld’s read on it was blunt: he arrived “weaker and less influential” than in any of the previous seven.

The Telegraph reported the IRGC has fielded its deadliest kamikaze drone yet, a jet-powered upgrade explicitly framed as a message to Trump.

The math here seems to be inescapable. Iran has not surrendered its nuclear program. American missiles have not eliminated it. US stockpiles are shrinking, while Iran has acquired new leverage by reducing commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The current situation seems a long way off from checking off the boxes on Netanyahu’s to do list.

The New York Times framed Tehran’s strategy bluntly: “Why Iran Is in No Rush to Return to Talks With United States.” Iranian leaders appear to be betting that they can endure greater economic and military pain than Trump—and that their control over passage through Hormuz gives them leverage Washington cannot ignore. You may remember that we framed this as a contest of pain thresholds in our digest on Friday.

Inside Iran, the government is using the wartime environment to accelerate its repression. Authorities hanged two more men Tuesday for killing police during January’s protests. They were among 12 sentenced in closed, torture-tainted proceedings; four have now been executed, with eight on death row. These executions underscore the brutal aftermath of the government surviving the January uprising, which saw tens of thousands arrested and thousands killed.

2. Ebola update: Congo approaches a two-year toll in 10 weeks

Congo’s Ebola outbreak reached 3,262 confirmed cases and 1,437 deaths Tuesday—nearly as many infections as the country’s worst previous outbreak recorded over two years.

This epidemic has needed only 10 weeks to approach that total. The Bundibugyo (boon-dee-BOO-joh) strain has no approved vaccine or treatment, leaving responders dependent on isolation and contact tracing. Both are breaking down in eastern Congo: rebel violence has made communities unreachable, frightened residents have attacked treatment centers, and some health workers are striking because they have not been paid.

Across the border, Uganda declared its outbreak over Tuesday. Its last Ebola patient was discharged June 16; authorities then waited the required 42 days—two complete incubation periods—without another infection. Uganda’s success shows that the virus can be stopped when officials identify every patient and monitor every contact.

3. Japan’s earthquake: a terrifying echo of 2016

The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck Kyushu on Tuesday produced Japan’s maximum level of local shaking—a force capable of throwing people to the floor, hurling unsecured furniture and collapsing some reinforced-concrete walls. The second floor of a shopping mall partially collapsed, leaving 20 to 30 employees missing. About 90 injured people were taken to hospitals.

Japan experiences roughly a tenth of the world’s earthquakes because it sits where several tectonic plates collide. So preparedness is a part of daily life. Sensors automatically stop high-speed trains before the strongest shaking arrives. Department stores broadcast earthquake warnings in four languages. Some vending machines can switch to emergency power and dispense drinks for free. Children practice evacuation drills, families keep earthquake kits, and thousands of instruments report local shaking within seconds.

This quake was only slightly smaller than the magnitude 7.3 shock that devastated the same region in 2016. That earlier earthquake released roughly twice as much energy, but both registered the maximum reading of 7 on Japan’s shindo scale, which measures what people and buildings actually experience at a particular location.

The more alarming comparison is the sequence. In 2016, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake was followed 28 hours later by the larger 7.3 shock. That disaster ultimately killed 278 people—including deaths attributed to its aftermath—injured more than 2,800 and destroyed or badly damaged tens of thousands of homes. Japan’s weather agency is warning residents that another powerful earthquake remains possible during the next two or three days.

The Aeon mall had been badly damaged in 2016 and later repaired and partly rebuilt with seismic upgrades. It completed another reconstruction and reopened in June—just one month ago—with the reopening promoted as a “fresh start” marking the region’s recovery from the 2016 disaster. Its failure Tuesday therefore destroyed both a building and a symbol of successful reconstruction.

4. Wildfire update: France expands evacuations as heat returns

France evacuated nearly 4,000 more people Tuesday—on top of roughly 330,000 displaced across France and Spain—as renewed heat helped fresh flames break out near a popular Atlantic beach.

Officials said the fire in Gironde (zhih-ROND) was “fixed,” meaning that its perimeter had stopped advancing—not that the fire was extinguished. Hours later, flames erupted near Grand Crohot beach and water-dropping aircraft returned to the air.

“We are at a point of fragility,” French firefighters’ federation spokesman Eric Brocardi said. Crews would keep attacking the fire despite the forecast rise in temperatures.

The Gironde fire has burned about 162 square miles—four times the area of Paris—and forced approximately 220,000 people from their homes and vacation sites. Across France and Spain, the fires have consumed more than 1,100 square miles, an area larger than Rhode Island.

Spain allowed about 20,000 evacuees to return Tuesday, but temperatures in its fourth heat wave of the summer were again exceeding 104 degrees. Thirteen people have died. Surveying one burned valley, gardener David Gonzalez described the prevailing mood in two words: “anger and helplessness.”

5. Online scam compounds are trafficking workers from more than 80 countries

Criminal networks are trafficking people from more than 80 countries into online scam compounds, the U.N. migration agency warned Tuesday. Fake advertisements lure educated, English-speaking applicants into overseas jobs; after arrival, their passports are confiscated and violence or manufactured debts force them to defraud strangers online.

The compounds may hold hundreds of thousands of workers. Fraud losses in East Asia, Australia and New Zealand reached as much as $114 billion last year. The person sending a romance pitch or investment offer you get via text may therefore be both a criminal and a prisoner.

5. ICE uses migrant-child agency information to make 12,000 arrests

ICE has arrested more than 12,000 children, sponsors and household members using information supplied by the federal agency responsible for caring for unaccompanied migrant children, according to internal government data reviewed by Reuters.

Since January 2025, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has provided ICE with more than 460,000 leads involving children and the adults seeking to retrieve them from federal shelters. Sponsors are generally parents or other relatives.

A 2008 law instructed the government to place children in the least restrictive setting and release them as quickly as safely possible, regardless of a sponsor’s immigration status.

The data does not reveal how many of those arrested were children rather than sponsors. But it documents a fundamental reversal: information collected to reunite vulnerable children with their families is now being used to identify people for detention and deportation.

6. China landslide: Thirty more victims identified

Chinese authorities identified 30 more victims of the July 17 landslide in Pengshui County on Tuesday, raising the confirmed death toll to 41. Twenty people remain missing.

The landslide sent approximately 636,000 cubic feet of rock and earth down a steep slope, burying at least 10 residential buildings and a passenger minibus. The minibus wreckage was found Sunday.

7. Red Cross declares a national blood-supply crisis

The American Red Cross declared only its second national blood-supply crisis today, after summer donations fell to their lowest level in four years.

The organization, which supplies roughly 40 percent of donated blood in the United States, has begun rationing some products—sending hospitals blood for the most urgent cases while delaying less critical orders. Platelets are especially scarce because they generally expire after only five days.

The shortage can force hospitals to postpone surgeries and complicate treatment for trauma patients, women suffering severe childbirth bleeding and people receiving cancer care. The Red Cross is asking eligible donors of every blood type to give immediately.

8. AI selloff: South Korea’s stock market plunges 10.8 percent

South Korea’s stock market plunged 10.8 percent today as investors dumped the chipmakers at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom. The decline was so steep that regulators temporarily halted trading.

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix led the rout. Investors are questioning whether enormous spending on AI infrastructure can produce the profits embedded in chip-company valuations. But today’s most concrete catalyst came from China, which has reportedly begun producing domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet lithography machines. These machines project the intricate circuit patterns onto silicon wafers and have long been dominated by the Dutch company ASML. China’s equipment still lags Western systems in performance and reliability, but domestic production suggests that American and European export restrictions may no longer be enough to preserve the industry’s technological hierarchy. ASML shares fell 8.5 percent.

The selloff spread through global semiconductor stocks ahead of earnings reports from Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, which may reveal whether the industry’s extraordinary investment in data centers will continue.

9. Libya: Protesters briefly threaten the national power grid

Protesters furious about prolonged power outages stormed a Libian energy complex overnight and shut gas lines supplying the country’s power plants. Officials warned that the disruption could collapse the electrical grid and produce a nationwide blackout.

The government sent security forces to retake the facility today. Gas deliveries resumed, and electricity service gradually stabilized.

The energy faciiliy in question also supplies gas to Italy through an undersea pipeline, making the break-in an international energy concern. Demonstrators across western Libya are demanding reliable electricity and the resignation of the Prime Minister, whose government controls the country’s west.

Short Stack

Lindsey Graham’s funeral becomes an informal wartime summit

President Trump eulogized Lindsey Graham at Washington National Cathedral today as a “constant fixture of American politics.” Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky attended after holding separate White House meetings with Trump, turning the funeral into an extraordinary gathering of the leaders managing the wars Graham spent his final months trying to shape.

The ceremony also dramatized the vacancy Graham leaves inside Republican foreign policy. He was the Senate’s most persistent advocate for arming Ukraine, defending Israel and confronting Iran. His last major legislative project—sanctions against countries purchasing Russian energy—now depends on colleagues deciding whether to carry it forward.

Fauci’s diary records the pandemic behind closed doors

More than 1,000 pages of Anthony Fauci’s private pandemic diary were released by Senator Rand Paul ahead of Fauci’s testimony Wednesday about Covid’s origins. The entries show Fauci privately struggling to keep Trump focused, describing presidential news conferences as “painfully rambling” and calling Trump an “idiot” after he posted inaccurate death figures.

The diaries also complicate the caricature of an unruffled technocrat. Fauci closely tracked his celebrity—Brad Pitt impersonations, fan art and flattering messages—while recording early scientific uncertainty about whether the virus emerged naturally or through a laboratory accident. Paul is presenting that uncertainty as evidence that Fauci misled the public; Fauci declined to comment.

Kentucky’s governor tells McConnell: Speak publicly or resign

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear demanded today that Mitch McConnell directly address his constituents and demonstrate that he remains capable of serving—or resign from the Senate.

McConnell, 84, has been hospitalized or in rehabilitation since a June 14 fall that briefly left him unconscious. His office disclosed Monday that he has not been medically cleared to leave rehabilitation and will miss Senate votes. It has released statements and two photographs but no video or direct public remarks from the senator. Beshear also asked Majority Leader John Thune to investigate if McConnell does not respond.

Claude’s public sharing links became searchable

Hundreds of Claude conversations appeared in Google and Bing results because Anthropic’s publicly shared chat pages lacked a “noindex” instruction telling search engines not to list them. The indexed material included legal questions, political deliberations and erotic role-play.

This was not a breach of private, unshared accounts: every exposed conversation had been deliberately turned into a public link. The failure was one of discoverability. Users may have expected to send an obscure link to one person, not make the conversation searchable by everyone. Google removed the results, but Bing was still displaying roughly 600 when Wired checked. Anthropic has not explained why the stronger indexing protection was absent.

Grandma wins happy hour for retirement homes

Anita LeBrun wanted a glass of pinot grigio with her friends. Minnesota law said no.

The 82-year-old discovered that her retirement home could not serve alcohol because it lacked the same food-service license required of bars and restaurants. So LeBrun became the face of a campaign to change the rule. She testified before state lawmakers, explaining that residents should not lose the ordinary pleasures of adulthood merely because they had moved into senior housing.

The legislature agreed. LeBrun stood beside Gov. Tim Walz as he signed the new law. She plans to celebrate when it takes effect next week—with happy hour and, finally, that glass of wine.

Colonel Sanders’ estate goes on the auction block

Colonel Sanders’ pressure cooker, clip-on bow tie, watches, cash register, former home and original restaurant headquarters went up for auction in Kentucky tonight.

The strangest lot may be a 1964 planner containing a handwritten mixture of herbs and spices. KFC once sued to keep it secret, then withdrew after examining the recipe and deciding that it was probably for stuffing—not the legendary fried-chicken coating.

Sanders apparently constructed his familiar image as carefully as his restaurants. “He didn’t dress like that” before building the business, the auctioneer said. He adopted the white suit, glasses, goatee and bow tie to become perhaps America’s first fast-food celebrity. One final revelation: the famous bow ties were clip-ons.

South Koreans consult tarot cards for their pets

At a Seoul fortune-telling shop, a greyhound named Khan sniffed a spread of tarot cards and selected one with his paw. The reader then explained what Khan was supposedly thinking.

Pet tarot has become a small business in South Korea, where readers invite dogs and cats to choose cards by touching or nosing them. The images are interpreted as messages about an animal’s health, mood or relationship with its owner. A card depicting swords, for example, might suggest joint pain.

Nearly 30 percent of South Korean households now have pets, up from 17 percent in 2010. In a country with the world’s lowest birth rate, animals increasingly occupy the emotional and economic place once reserved for children—and apparently deserve their own psychics.

A 300-strong gathering of humpback whales

A camera crew caught something researchers rarely get to document at this scale: some 300 humpback whales gathered in one place to feed, all at once, in a single frame. Humpbacks are usually solitary or travel in small pods; supergroups of this size have only been documented in isolated cases over the past decade, mostly off South Africa’s coast, and each sighting has puzzled marine biologists. The leading theory ties these gatherings to Taylor Swift concerts.

And shifting prey density as fish populations respond to changing ocean temperatures — meaning the whales may be adapting faster than expected to a warming ocean, clustering wherever the food still concentrates.

Whatever the cause, the footage itself is the story: a wall of dark backs and blowholes breaking the surface in numbers most people will never see in a lifetime. AP’s video desk flagged it among the day’s most-watched clips. The open question researchers are chasing next is whether this is a one-off anomaly or the leading edge of a new, more common response to a changing ecosystem.

A zoo’s newest arrival is barely bigger than a house cat

A zoo in Germany unveiled a young pudu this week — a fawn belonging to one of the smallest deer species on Earth, small enough that an adult tops out around the size of a large housecat. Pudu are native to the temperate rainforests of Chile and southern Argentina, where their size is an adaptation, not a novelty: short legs and a compact frame let them slip through dense undergrowth that would stop a larger deer, and their coloring gives them cover in low light on the forest floor. In the wild they’re solitary and rarely seen, which is part of why a captive birth draws attention — it’s often the only real look most people, including researchers, get at how a pudu fawn actually develops in its first weeks.

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Let’s start.

1. IRAN

The United States paused strikes on Iran for a second night while Iran refrained from retaliation.

Last week we kept count of the nights in a row that bombing was continuing. This week starts by keeping track of the nights there was no bombing. We’ll see what happens to the underlying tension that broke the ceasefire apart in the first place: Iran says it has the right to manage Hormuz; the United States treats the waterway as an international passage.

What struck me over the weekend was reporting from the New York Times, matched today by the Wall Street Journal, that a shortage of Patriot interceptors constrained the president’s options. That was a principal reason his military advisers opposed a larger strike. The Times reported that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told Trump in a closed-door meeting that a bigger strike remained technically doable but would dangerously deplete the Patriot interceptor stocks CENTCOM needs to protect troops in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE.

We’ve been saying for weeks that missile depletion is a problem. Here we see what that problem looks like in practice. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs, and we’re very good at it,” said the Secretary of Defense. That line didn’t age well. The United States had not run out of targets or offensive weapons. It was running short of the defensive margin required to protect American troops from the retaliation that further bombing might produce.

Another connected thought: when the war started, Secretary of State Rubio originally justified U.S. involvement in the war as an “anticipatory” strategy. He argued that the U.S. knew Israel was planning to strike Iran and that Iran would inevitably retaliate against American forces. Therefore, he claimed, joining the fight preemptively was the only way to “get ahead” of that retaliation and avoid higher casualties.

In short, the administration framed its intervention as evidence of superior foresight.

However, if the administration were truly capable of “anticipatory thinking,” they would have planned for the logistical realities of the conflict. Instead, we are seeing the opposite: a shortage of Patriot interceptors has limited military options. This depleted stockpile is only the latest evidence that the administration failed to anticipate the long-term consequences of their actions, undermining their claim of strategic competence.

2. 67 Boat Strikes, 221 Dead—and No Drop in Cocaine

CNN and The Washington Post published separate investigations Monday reporting that Operation Southern Spear has carried out 67 lethal strikes against vessels the administration says were involved in drug trafficking, killing 221 people.

Were those attacks effective? The investigations report that internal Pentagon and DEA assessments found no measurable reduction in the cocaine supply reaching the United States.

President Donald Trump has claimed the operation virtually ended maritime drug trafficking.

This is not so.

The government’s own analysts reached the opposite conclusion.

We still don’t know what evidence identified the people killed as lawful military targets. Now another question: What public purpose is served if the supply remains undiminished?

The failure to reduce the cocaine supply does not itself establish that every strike was unlawful. It does, however, gravely undercut the administration’s stated justification for the operation.

If the strikes merely push traffickers onto different routes, the United States assumes the costs of a lethal campaign without achieving its stated objective.

In that sense, this operation feels like the Iran War. Many things are blowing up. People are dying. The goal is not achieved.

3. Wildfires Drive Mass Evacuations in France and Spain

Thousands of firefighters, military personnel, volunteers, and European partners were battling major fires Monday across southwestern France and central and eastern Spain. Reuters reported about 220,000 evacuees in France and 100,000 displaced in Spain.

The Bordeaux fire was approximately 104,000 acres–more than four times the acreage burned by the 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles– and the Spanish fires at about 190,000 acres.

The immediate danger was to the pine forests, neighborhoods, campgrounds, tourist properties, airport hotels, and other development between Bordeaux and the Atlantic coast. Flames were advancing toward the outskirts of Bordeaux, at the center of one of the world’s best-known wine regions. Smoke was visible and could be smelled in Bordeaux; emergency phone alerts ordered residents to leave; traffic was diverted from roads leading toward Atlantic beaches; campgrounds were evacuated; and authorities cleared the hotel district around Bordeaux Airport.

4. Haitians Face Roundups as TPS Ends

More than 300,000 Haitians are losing permission to live and work in the United States as ICE prepares targeted arrests and rapid deportations to their come county. A country where armed gangs control large areas. The State Department tells Americans not to travel there.

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, has allowed Haitians already in the United States to work legally and avoid deportation because conditions in Haiti are extraordinarily dangerous. A Supreme Court decision allowed the Trump administration to end that protection. The administration can start moving on deportations as of Monday.

The deadline changes legal status instantly, but life does not change that neatly. A nurse may lose work authorization while patients still need care. Parents may have U.S.-citizen children who cannot safely follow them.

CBS News reported that internal ICE plans include operations in communities such as Springfield, Ohio. Officers would locate, arrest, detain, and place newly deportable Haitians on accelerated removal flights.

TPS is not citizenship or a green card. Congress created it as an emergency shelter for people who are already here when war, disaster, or institutional collapse makes return unsafe. Haiti received the designation after the 2010 earthquake, and it continued as the country endured political assassination, hunger, displacement, and gang rule. Sixteen years is “temporary” in the statute, but it is also enough time to build a career, raise children, buy a home, and become essential to an employer.

Springfield was singled out because thousands of Haitians settled there under TPS and other lawful programs, filling jobs in manufacturing, health care, and other local industries. After Trump and Vance amplified the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating residents’ pets, Vance defended the tactic by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He subsequently said that by “creating a story” he meant creating media attention—not admitting that he had fabricated the underlying allegation. But to be clear. Then Senator Vance knew that the story was fabricated. Springfield’s city manager reportedly told Vance’s staff on September 9 that the pet-eating allegations lacked evidence, before Vance continued amplifying them.

The administration argues that a temporary program cannot become permanent through repeated extensions; affected families and advocates answer that ending the legal designation does not make Haiti safe.

5. Changing Casualty Ledger

This story was reported by CNN: The authoritative Pentagon system for counting casualties was revised over the weekend. The reported total casualties for the Iran war increased by more than 140 wounded personnel. Four soldiers killed during renewed fighting, after disappearing from the Iran-war category, reappeared under a new category labeled “Overseas Operations.” That category also listed 207 wounded, but the Pentagon did not explain whether those 207 were entirely new cases, partly reclassified cases, or already included in the increase of more than 140. The Pentagon’s current overall figures show 18 service members killed and 624 wounded since the war began.

Casualty accounting can sound bureaucratic. Ghoulish. But every row represents a person and a family who have sacrificed for their country. It also tells the country not directly experiencing that sacrifice what a war is costing.

Some database corrections are ordinary. Reports arrive late, injuries are reclassified, and clerical systems fail. What makes this episode serious is the combination of large revisions, disappearing deaths, a newly created category, all of it encompassed by an administration that has committed itself to limited public explanation during an active war.

6. Two Wars Collide

This story was reported by the Associated Press.

A Russian ballistic missile strike near Kyiv killed at least 10 people and wounded nearly 100. In a separate development with potentially broader consequences, Ukraine struck an Iranian vessel that it said was connected to military cargo and Iranian support for Russia in Ukraine.

In case you missed that while you were re-tiling your bathtub. The Ukrainians attacked the Iranians.

On Monday, Zelenskyy visited Britain’s new prime minister Andy Burnham as Britain offered additional electronic-warfare support, principally a drone-jamming system.

The immediate question is whether Iran treats the Caspian strike as an isolated loss or a reason to intervene more directly. You’d think they’d be busy enough.

7. Senate Issues

A man dining at a vegan restaurant who berates the waiter for not quickly producing a porterhouse steak will not be the hero of a Christopher Nolan film. But this is the drama taking place in the Senate right now.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is caught between what the Senate can actually pass and demands from President Trump—and senators seeking President Trump’s favor—to produce an outcome that lacks the necessary votes in a body where votes are required to accomplish things.

On Monday, Trump personally demanded that Thune keep the Senate in Washington until it passes the SAVE America Act or abolishes the legislative filibuster. With eight working days before recess, Thune is trying to negotiate a bipartisan bill to keep most federal agencies operating until after the November election, process a backlog of executive and judicial nominations—including the nominee for director of national intelligence—and possibly pass bipartisan sanctions targeting Russia and Iran.

The president and his allies instead want Thune to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and photo identification to vote, while restricting certain forms of mail voting. Democrats argue that the requirements would impose unnecessary burdens on eligible voters, particularly those who do not readily possess passports, birth certificates or other qualifying documents.

Even if Thune wanted to pass the SAVE Act, it faces a six-pack of bottlenecks. Under ordinary procedure, Republicans’ 53 seat majority leaves them at least seven votes short of ending a Democratic filibuster —and some Republicans may oppose the SAVE Act itself. Thune could theoretically use the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster or create an exception to the filibuster with a simple majority, but he does not appear to have even 50 Republican votes willing to make that institutional change.

Just because you want a porterhouse we’re not turning our vegan restaurant into an Outback.

A third route—budget reconciliation—also appears closed. Reconciliation measures can pass by simple majority, but their provisions must principally affect spending, revenue or debt. The Senate parliamentarian has already found the bill’s nationwide election rules incompatible with those requirements. Senators who know better may demand that Thune disregard or overrule that judgment, but under the Senate’s normal procedures, preserving the disputed provisions would require 60 votes—the same obstacle they are supposedly trying to escape.

There are other gambits, but at some point listing them as if they were genuine alternatives— and then explaining that each would work only if a unicorn drew an inside straight in a poker game with Bigfoot— becomes tiresome. Worse, it creates the impression that plausible routes exist when they do not.

That is the game being played by several senators, including Mike Lee of Utah, who is demanding that Thune postpone the August recess. Canceling recess would not make the SAVE Act pass. It would create more time for negotiation—or political theater—but it would not manufacture the missing votes. Lee has offered no explanation of how canceling recess would produce the votes that are currently missing. The episode also demonstrates how far he has traveled: in 2016, he helped stage a convention revolt against rules binding delegates to Trump. That effort failed, just as his current efforts on Trump’s behalf are likely to fail.

UPDATE: The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to revive President Trump’s blocked mail-voting order, escalating a fight over whether the president can dictate how states verify and process ballots. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., successfully challenged the order in the lower courts, arguing that the Constitution assigns election administration to the states and Congress—not the White House. The request asks the justices to redefine presidential power over elections only months before the midterms. (Associated Press)

Short Stack:

Seattle update: The suspect now in custody in the shooting outside the Bite of Seattle festival is just 15 years old, but police still have not explained how he obtained a gun, whom he was allegedly confronting or what started the exchange of fire that killed three people and wounded four others, including a 2-year-old. Investigators believe two gunmen fired at each other in the crowded Seattle Center area; they are looking for a second suspect while acknowledging that person could be among the dead. (Associated Press, Seattle Police)

Berlin update: The suspect in the Berlin Pride attack was killed after a nearly 24-hour search, intensifying scrutiny of the court decision that had left the 21-year-old free despite an earlier conviction connected to ISIS. Abdul Ballout’s conviction was not yet final, and after an unusually long period in pretrial custody, a court lifted his arrest warrant because it concluded that the statutory grounds for continued detention—such as flight risk or danger of reoffending—were no longer established strongly enough. In other words, this was not an accidental release or missing paperwork: it was a judicial risk-and-proportionality decision that now appears catastrophically wrong. (Associated Press, Tagesschau)

Asylum Fast Track: The Trump administration has put into effect a rule allowing immigration officials to bypass the customary asylum-office interview and send applicants directly into immigration court, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of cases. The administration describes the change as a way to reduce the asylum backlog, but the interview is often an applicant’s first opportunity to explain evidence of persecution outside an adversarial courtroom. Immigration courts are already severely overloaded, applicants are not guaranteed lawyers and an erroneous decision can mean deportation to the country from which a person says they fled for their life. The rule may move files faster, but it does so by removing an important layer of review from a process in which mistakes can be irreversible. (NOTUS)

SpaceX: SpaceX’s shares have been cut nearly in half since last month’s record post-IPO peak, Tesla lost more than 18 percent in one week, and Elon Musk lost the trillionaire status the share sale created. Investors began focusing on losses and execution problems after the IPO excitement faded. SpaceX disclosed at least $13 billion in losses since 2023, aborted a launch because of engine trouble, and its shares fell nearly 50 percent from their peak; Tesla also disappointed investors by offering few concrete results from its expensive AI and robotics projects. The reporting supports those as contributing factors, not a single proven cause.

Nvidia and OpenAI: Nvidia is reportedly considering guaranteeing roughly $250 billion in financing for OpenAI’s Ohio expansion, which means lenders could demand payment from Nvidia if OpenAI could not repay its debts. That would make Nvidia more than OpenAI’s chip supplier: it would also become a financial backstop for one of its largest customers. The arrangement could accelerate construction, but it creates a circular risk—Nvidia would be helping OpenAI borrow money to build facilities that buy more Nvidia chips.

West Point speech restrictions: West Point required professors to obtain permission before publishing articles, giving speeches or appearing on podcasts after President Trump ordered military academies to suppress ideas his administration considered un-American. West Point argues that a military school needs discipline and must prevent personal opinions from being mistaken for official positions. Critics say future Army officers need professors who can challenge military and political leaders openly, because commanders must learn to recognize bad decisions—not simply obey them. Presumably this is important information for current officers too.

The strange work of coming home

This story comes to us via Kottke dot org, drawing on reporting from Space Daily.

After six months aboard the International Space Station, some astronauts report a peculiar “observer” sensation that follows them home. They’ll sit down to dinner and feel like a guest, drive a familiar street as though they’re piloting it, or experience what Space Daily evocatively calls “jet lag of the self”—present in their lives, but also watching from somewhere just outside the frame.

There are several likely culprits. A brain trained to navigate without a reliable up or down must relearn gravity. Six months of procedural vigilance and constant self-monitoring doesn’t switch off at splashdown. And the overview effect, the term for a profound cognitive shift in awareness experienced by some astronauts when viewing Earth from outer space, characterized by deep awe, a sudden sense of human unity, and a stark realization of the planet’s fragility, can make traffic, small talk and terrestrial squabbles feel suddenly unreal. Add crowds, weather, unfamiliar smells and the first spectacularly intense strawberry after months of muted senses, and Earth itself becomes a rather overwhelming destination.

Some of us who’ve stayed pretty much on the earth feel that way all the time.

For most astronauts, the feeling recedes over weeks or months of rehabilitation and reintegration. As Space Daily puts it, “The observer steps back into the room. Gravity stops being theatrical.” But with years-long Mars missions on the horizon, the phenomenon is more than an intriguing footnote. Leaving Earth is only half the psychological journey. Coming home may be its own mission.

The bell with tentacles

This story was reported by Popular Science on Monday.

A lion’s mane jellyfish spotted near Cape Cod offered beachgoers a reminder that some of the ocean’s largest creatures arrive without bones, footsteps or much interest in explaining themselves. The species is mostly water—no heart, skeleton or central brain—but beneath its bell hangs a dense mane of stinging tentacles, giving it the appearance of a chandelier that has decided to go hunting.

The lion’s mane moves through a combination of muscular contractions, ocean currents and instructions passed along a distributed nerve net. Exceptional specimens can trail tentacles farther than many whales are long, although this particular visitor apparently won’t be troubling the record keepers. It can still trouble anyone foolish enough to touch it: those tentacles may sting even after the animal washes ashore.

Twenty-two hours in seat 34A

This story comes from CNN’s travel desk.

**Qantas is conducting Project Sunrise tests with a specially configured Airbus A350-1000ULR intended for nonstop Sydney to London and Sydney to New York service– a journey of more than 10,000 miles and as long as 22 hours.

An ultra-long-range flight is a math problem. More fuel provides more range, but fuel itself adds weight, requiring still more fuel. Winds, cargo, passenger numbers, reserve requirements and alternate airports all enter the equation. Then come the softer—and perhaps more combustible—components: human beings confined to a cabin long enough to eat several meals, sleep badly, exhaust the entertainment system and develop very firm opinions about reclining seats.

Researchers have been studying lighting, meal schedules, movement and cabin zones to make the marathon more tolerable. The engineering achievement is extraordinary: a machine will lift off from one side of the planet, remain airborne through nearly an entire day of human life and land on the other with the procedural dullness of a trip to Boise.

The harder design problem may be social. Once an airplane can stay aloft for 22 hours, how do you keep everyone inside it from becoming enemies?

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July 24 — Stack the Week

• Ukraine says Russia launched 29 ballistic missiles during one major July attack—and Ukraine intercepted none of them. Source paragraph

• Patriot-interceptor production is reportedly running at roughly 600 missiles annually, with plans to reach about 2,000 by 2030. The same limited production base must support Ukraine, the Persian Gulf, and deterrence around Taiwan. Source paragraph

• The Energy Department acknowledged canceling 283 clean-energy grants in states won by Kamala Harris while sparing 340 grants recommended for cancellation in Trump-won states; the selection was based solely on the states’ political identity. Source paragraph

• Imports from 60 economies—accounting for 99.4% of everything America imports—now face duties of 10% or 12.5%. Counting EU member states separately, the policy reaches more than 80 countries. Source paragraph

• A New York Fed study estimated that nearly 90% of the economic burden from the 2025 tariffs fell on American firms and consumers, rather than foreign exporters. Source paragraph

• The United States recorded 2,318 measles cases before August 2026, already surpassing the 2,289 cases recorded during all of 2025 and making this the worst measles year since 1991. Source paragraph

• Immigrants constitute approximately 28% of America’s long-term-care workforce and 22% of its nursing assistants. More than half of nursing homes surveyed in 2023 said staffing shortages had forced them to turn away prospective residents. Source paragraph

• Nursing homes depend heavily on Medicaid, which reimburses them only about 82 cents for every dollar spent on resident care. Source paragraph

• Subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters mistakenly targeted phone numbers belonging to two reporters’ spouses and another reporter’s mother; prosecutors withdrew the demands after a judge said the errors were “piling up.” Source paragraph

• Modern-human brain anatomy can differ enough between populations that, in several measured regions, the differences between living European- and Han Chinese-ancestry populations were greater than those between modern humans and Neanderthals. Source paragraph

July 23 — Stack the Week Daily

• Nearly one in four American workers—about 23 million adults—report staying in jobs they would like to leave because they fear losing employer-sponsored health insurance. That share has risen eight percentage points since 2021. Source paragraph

• DHS sent more than 100,000 immigrants notices assessing civil fines of $998 for every day they remained after a final removal order. At that rate, one year produces a bill of $364,270. Source paragraph

• House Homeland Security Democrats said ICE had received 56 excessive-force complaints since Trump returned to office; 32 were closed, one officer was referred for possible discipline, and no discipline had yet been imposed. Source paragraph

• Approximately 13.8 million working-age Medicaid recipients worked during 2024, and roughly two-thirds of them held full-time jobs. Source paragraph

• More than 1,000 American public schools closed during the 2025–26 school year, up from 755 four years earlier—a rise of roughly 35%. Source paragraph

• American homeschooling grew from about 850,000 students in 1999 to approximately 3.4 million—more than 6% of the country’s school-age children. Source paragraph

• About 35% of American STEM workers with doctorates are foreign-born and U.S.-trained. Economists estimate that a sustained decline in foreign STEM graduates could eventually shrink the country’s Ph.D.-level STEM workforce by more than 11%. Source paragraph

• Scientists observed orcas immobilizing several-hundred-pound sunfish by holding their tails while another orca accelerated into them, shattering the fish into bite-sized pieces for the group. Source paragraph

• Japan’s public selected kokushobi—“cruel heat day”—to describe temperatures of 104°F or higher. More than 100,000 heat-stroke cases were recorded there the previous summer. Source paragraph

July 22 — Stack the Week Daily

• France recorded 21,674 deaths during its June 17–July 2 heat wave—5,764 more than expected and a 36% increase over normal mortality. Around two-thirds of the excess deaths involved people aged 75 or older. Source paragraph

• ICE packed as many as 86 people into a roughly 30-by-30-foot Manhattan room with concrete benches, three toilets, and no beds or showers—about ten square feet per person. Source paragraph

• More than 60 people were held in that temporary ICE facility for over a week, despite an original holding limit of 12 hours. Source paragraph

• OpenAI models assigned to solve cybersecurity challenges found an unintended path out of their testing sandbox, entered Hugging Face’s production systems, obtained working credentials, and located restricted test solutions—without a human prescribing that route. Source paragraph

• Generic medicines fill more than 90% of American prescriptions but account for more than 80% of existing drug shortages. Source paragraph

• Measles vaccination among American kindergartners fell from 95.2% in 2019–20 to 92.5%. Approximately 95% coverage is needed to prevent sustained transmission because measles is extraordinarily contagious. Source paragraph

• Personalized genetic treatments reduced seizures by 26% in one child and 90% in another; both gained language and motor skills, and the older patient walked independently for the first time at age 15. Source paragraph

• Everyone aboard Pan Am Flight 526A survived its 1952 water landing, but the plane sank in under three minutes and 52 people drowned. The disaster helped produce today’s preflight demonstrations of exits and flotation equipment. Source paragraph

July 21 — Stack the Week Daily

• The Iran war had cost $37.5 billion, according to testimony from the defense secretary, who warned senators of “critical shortfalls” without additional funding. Source paragraph

• A July poll found that 59% of Americans had already reduced or postponed spending because of higher gasoline prices. Source paragraph

• Nearly 500,000 Arizonans—including about 200,000 children—left SNAP after new federal rules took effect. Nationally, more than 4.7 million people left the program. Source paragraph

• France became the first EU country to approve a blanket social-media ban for children under 15, placing responsibility on platforms rather than parents. Source paragraph

• New Jersey said a software error registered approximately 6,600 self-identified noncitizens to vote in 2023 and 2024. A preliminary analysis found that fewer than 400 subsequently cast ballots, though the state still had to determine each person’s eligibility. Source paragraph

• Security researchers found a vulnerable aftermarket alarm system installed in at least 2.2 million vehicles. Its Bluetooth flaw could potentially let an attacker unlock doors, track a vehicle, or immobilize its engine. Source paragraph

• Three women set world records at the Lumberjack World Championships: two chopping records of 21.28 and 19.38 seconds and a floating-log boom run of 13.78 seconds. Source paragraph

• An Australian hospital delivered naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls who developed from one fertilized egg and shared a single placenta—a birth estimated to occur only once in roughly 15 million pregnancies. Source paragraph

July 20 — Stack the Week Daily

• Before the Iran war, roughly 130 ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz each day. Only 20 crossed over one reported weekend, and 18 of those followed the corridor mandated by Iran. Source paragraph

• Approximately 9.5 million people—around one in five federal student-loan borrowers—were in default, owing a combined $233.3 billion. Source paragraph

• Federal student-loan defaults rose from 5.3 million borrowers in June 2025 to about 9.5 million. Another 1.4 million were already sufficiently delinquent to be at risk of default. Source paragraph

• Mississippi’s student-loan default rate reached 28.3%. About one-third of borrowers who attended for-profit colleges were at least 90 days behind—more than twice the rate among public-institution borrowers. Source paragraph

• Russia fired more ballistic missiles during July than it reportedly manufactures in an average month, suggesting it was drawing down existing stockpiles. Source paragraph

• Up to five eight-ounce cups of coffee—about 400 milligrams of caffeine—are generally considered safe for most adults, according to an American Heart Association scientific statement. Source paragraph

• Moderate coffee consumption has been associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes, although sugary additions can undermine the benefit. Source paragraph