Stack the Week Daily

Welcome to Stack the Week for July 13th, Monday.

The daily experiment continues. Thank you for the feedback, the emails, and the steady stream of notes. Oh and the Apple podcast reviews are helpful. They introduce us to a wider audience.

If you’re reading this text on a screen instead of listening to the audio, remember that this is also designed as a podcast. You can hear me read it while you’re commuting, folding laundry, or pondering what you’re going to do with all that World Cup knowledge you accumulated after next week.

A brief note about Laura Doan and Annie Cohen. They have both increased the labor participation rate by finding employment in corporations larger than Dickerson Enterprises and Picayune. Congratulations to them both!

Okay, let’s start.

Man Made Deaths

How do you count the people who die because someone dismantled the system that would have kept them alive? That’s the question Atul Gawande raises in the latest New Yorker, borrowing a concept from historian Richard Rhodes called “public man-made death.”Examples include: the child whose malnutrition treatment never comes, the woman who dies in childbirth after her clinic closes, the tuberculosis patient whose medicine disappears. Gawande cites research from Boston University and The Lancet estimating that the dismantling of USAID has already contributed to roughly 700,000 deaths, with millions more possible if the cuts persist. Those figures remain projections and are disputed by the Trump administration and Elon Musk who ran the operation that dismantled USAID. But Gawande’s larger point survives the debate over the exact number: policy decisions can kill people just as surely as wars do.

Why did we lead with this? Because our sorting criteria at the moment weighs human death– no matter what nationality of human– as a key priority. Human death as a consequence of human choices also pushes it higher.

Iran is Back On

Imagine you’re the captain of a 1,000-foot supertanker—longer than three football fields—or a container ship stacked 20 stories high, entering one of the most dangerous waterways on Earth. You’ve switched off your AIS transponder—the electronic beacon that normally tells nearby ships, insurers, and satellites who you are and where you’re headed. That makes you harder to target, but harder for everyone else to avoid. Collision risk rises. Rescue becomes more difficult. Insurers lose the ability to monitor your voyage in real time. Oh, and you might hit a mine or be hit by a drone.

That’s why only six ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, the lowest daily total in five weeks. Before the war, roughly 3,000 ships crossed every month, carrying about one-fifth of the world’s oil.

One of them was hit anyway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked a Cyprus-flagged container ship because it used what Iran called an unauthorized route, crippling the vessel and leaving one civilian crew member missing. Open access to the Strait of Hormuz was part of June’s ceasefire agreement. By declaring which routes are “authorized,” Iran is rewriting that agreement by force.

The United States answered with a third round of strikes in a week, reportedly hitting about 140 Iranian military targets.

Before February, Iran had almost no say over what moved through Hormuz. Today, it fires warning shots, dictates shipping lanes, inspects commercial traffic, and proposes charging tolls.

Monday President Donald Trump declared the United States would become the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait,” said it would charge ships a 20 percent fee for safe passage, and suggested America would effectively take responsibility for keeping the waterway open. That will take more time, money, military effort and risk, just the kind of mission-creep candidate Trump often argued had drawn previous presidents into costly, open-ended conflicts.

The Financial Times reports that Dubai is planning a new port designed to reduce dependence on Hormuz altogether. They no longer see it as a passing military episode.

The Washington Post reports that Israel shared intelligence with Washington, indicating that elements of Iran’s hard-line leadership want President Donald Trump dead. U.S. officials stress the intelligence reflects the views of ultra-hardliners rather than an approved assassination plot. Some officials also caution that Israel may have emphasized intelligence because it knows how President Donald Trump makes decisions: present him as the target, and he may become more receptive to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that military pressure on Iran should continue.

Trump dismissed the warning. “Israel came up with nothing,” he told the New York Post, while adding that he has been Iran’s “number one” target for years.

Security officials worry less about an official assassination order than about a lone actor inspired by the rhetoric. A government doesn’t have to authorize an attack if one supporter decides to carry it out.

A New York Times report. It says Mossad secretly recruited former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—the man who once called for Israel’s destruction—met him in Budapest, paid his expenses, hid him inside Iran after the war began, and hoped he might someday lead the country.

Another ICE Death

A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man during an ICE enforcement operation Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, after authorities say he drove his vehicle toward an officer while attempting to flee. The shooting brings to at least nine the number of people who have died during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. State and local officials from both parties, including Governor Janet Mills, Senator Susan Collins and Mayor Liam LaFountain, called for a full, transparent investigation. The agents were not wearing body cameras, leaving investigators without video evidence of the encounter. The shooting also comes as Minnesota prosecutors announced they have finally obtained evidence the Trump administration withheld for more than six months in two earlier fatal ICE-related shootings, while prosecutors in Houston say federal officials are still refusing to provide key evidence in another fatal ICE shooting last week.

Lindsey Graham Fallout

Just one day before he died, Senator Lindsey Graham was on the phone from Kyiv with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, celebrating what he believed was a breakthrough. After months of lobbying President Donald Trump, he had finally won White House backing for his bipartisan Russia sanctions bill. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead.

He had suffered an acute aortic dissection—a tear in the inner wall of the aorta, the body’s largest artery. Blood had forced its way between the layers of the artery wall, causing them to separate. It is one of the deadliest cardiovascular emergencies in medicine. Roughly half of patients die before reaching a hospital. Doctors describe the pain as feeling “like a knife to the heart.”

Graham had just returned from his tenth trip to Ukraine. His bipartisan sanctions bill would impose severe secondary sanctions and tariffs on countries—including China and India—that continue buying Russian oil.

In the short term, Republicans effectively lose one vote. Until South Carolina appoints a successor and Senator Mitch McConnell returns from medical leave, Republicans have only a 51-47 majority on paper.

Graham’s death also creates one more Senate race Democrats will at least examine. South Carolina remains a deeply Republican state. Donald Trump carried it by roughly 18 percentage points in 2024, Republicans hold every statewide elected office, and Republican Governor Henry McMaster has appointed Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, as her late brother’s temporary replacement . That makes a Democratic pickup unlikely.

Even so, an open seat is almost always more competitive than one held by a well-known incumbent. Republicans may have to spend money defending South Carolina.

To win the Senate, Democrats must gain four Republican-held seats while holding every Democratic seat they currently control. The key Republican targets remain North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Alaska, Iowa and Texas, while Democrats must also defend the open seat in Michigan.

The overall judgment from six pollsters and political analysts surveyed by The New York Times was consistent: Democrats remain favored to win the House, but the Senate map still tilts toward Republicans. North Carolina appears to be Democrats’ strongest pickup opportunity. Beyond that, they would likely have to win several states Donald Trump carried comfortably.

McConnell Speaks

After four weeks of speculation, McConnell explained his absence: a fall at his Washington home on June 14 left him briefly unconscious and hospitalized, followed by a mild case of pneumonia. The 84-year-old, who survived childhood polio and has fallen repeatedly this year, said his doctors found no fractures, no stroke, no heart attack, no tumor. He’s moved to a rehabilitation center and isn’t cleared to return to the floor. His statement came with a photo — smiling beside his wife Elaine Chao, holding Sunday’s Washington Post sports section, a tacit answer to online rumors that he’d died.

He addressed the long silence directly: “You all know how folks of my generation often hesitate to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.” It took Kentucky’s Democratic governor publicly asking him to update the public to break it. McConnell is retiring in January, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history.

Times Subpoenas

When does a leak investigation become an attack on the press? That’s the question raised Friday when federal agents showed up at the homes of four New York Times reporters with subpoenas ordering them to testify before a Manhattan grand jury this Wednesday. Their reporting had revealed that President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One lacked some of the defensive systems installed on the older presidential aircraft, prompting the Secret Service to switch the President back to the older plane for part of his trip home from the NATO summit.

Before publication, the FBI urged the newspaper not to publish the story, arguing it would damage national security, and demanded the identities of the reporters’ confidential sources. The Times refused. The Justice Department insists the reporters are not the targets. The targets, it says, are government officials who illegally disclosed classified information.

The dispute reaches beyond whether one story should have run. News organizations argue that compelling reporters to identify confidential sources weakens one of the few independent checks on government power. Much of what the public knows about how wars are fought, intelligence agencies operate, presidents make decisions and taxpayer money is spent comes from officials willing to speak only if their identities remain protected.

For decades, subpoenaing reporters was treated as an extraordinary measure reserved for the rarest circumstances. The Trump administration has revived the tactic. Earlier this year it subpoenaed reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal before withdrawing those demands after court challenges.

The larger question isn’t whether governments should investigate leaks. Every administration does. The question is where the line sits between protecting national secrets and protecting the independent reporting citizens rely on to understand what their government is doing. That question carries particular weight during a war, when governments naturally seek greater secrecy, and in an administration that has made aggressive use of executive power while providing relatively little visibility into its internal decision-making. If courts allow prosecutors to routinely compel journalists to reveal their sources, the consequence will reach far beyond this one airplane. It will shape what government officials are willing to reveal—and what the rest of us are able to know.

Blanche Has Rough Times Ahead

Who does the Attorney General work for? A federal judge offered a sharp answer Monday in a 56-page ruling rejecting one of the Trump administration’s most controversial legal agreements.

The case began when President Donald Trump sued the IRS over the disclosure of his tax returns. The Justice Department later announced a settlement that did far more than end that lawsuit. It granted President Trump, his family and their businesses broad protection from future IRS investigations and proposed creating a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who claimed they had been victims of government “weaponization.” The administration later claimed to have abandoned the fund after bipartisan criticism but said the tax protections would remain.

Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the agreement was not a legitimate settlement but “an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy” to a deal conferring extraordinary protections on the President and those affiliated with him. The suit, she wrote, “was not brought to vindicate rights” but to “manipulate the judicial process” — an attempt to use the court “to provide some legitimacy” to a deal conferring immunity and earmarking taxpayer billions for grievances the law does not define. A lawsuit needs two opposing sides, and this one had a president suing an agency he runs. “It is risible,” she wrote, “to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.” Someone should do a count on the use of the word risible in responses to Trump administration lawsuits.

She barred the parties from describing the arrangement as a “settlement,” sanctioned Trump attorney Daniel Epstein and prohibited him from practicing in the Southern District of Florida for one year. She also said she would forward her opinion to New York disciplinary authorities already investigating Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Those penalties make the decision more than an angry judicial rebuke: the judge formally concluded that the lawyers had misused the legal process.

The Justice Department occupies a peculiar place in American government. The Attorney General is appointed by the President but is expected to represent the interests of the United States—not the personal legal interests of the President who appointed him.

That principle and this case now sits at the center of Blanche’s confirmation hearing this week. Senators aren’t simply deciding whether to promote a nominee. They’re deciding whether the nation’s chief law enforcement officer should be someone a federal judge concluded tried to use the courts to legitimize extraordinary legal protections for the President and his family.

The Family Business

The war in Iran has driven billions of dollars toward defense technology. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s sons have been investing in companies positioned to receive that money.

A Washington Post analysis found Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump tied, mainly through two investment firms, to more than a dozen defense technology and artificial intelligence companies. Since President Trump’s election, those companies have received at least $3.2 billion in federal contracts, with another $3.1 billion available through contract options. Some are also eligible to compete for much larger pools of future Pentagon work.

Some of the companies held federal contracts before the Trump sons invested. The companies say they won the work on merit, Pentagon officials say political relationships played no role, and the White House calls the reporting “the same, tired narrative.” Which, we should note, is a response not an answer.

No evidence shows that Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump broke the law or personally steered a contract.

The conflict lies elsewhere: the President is expanding military spending while members of his family hold financial interests in companies that can benefit from it.

Private institutions often run on relationships or even just vibes. Government is supposed to impose a higher standard though because the money belongs to the public. Competitive bidding, career contracting officers, inspectors general, financial disclosures, congressional oversight and the press are meant to ensure that contracts follow merit rather than access.

But influence does not always leave evidence of a phone call or an order. Companies know who has access. Investors anticipate where government money will move. Officials know which relationships carry political weight. Proximity can acquire value without anyone explicitly trading a favor.

That is why this is not merely a story about nepotism. It is a conflict-of-interest story about a wartime spending boom, a presidential family investing inside it, and whether the safeguards separating public decisions from private gain remain strong enough to earn public trust. Or, maybe it may just be an election story. While the majority of Americans say the country’s economy isn’t working for them, this is another story where things work out well for those in power.

Bangkok Fire

Twenty-seven people died in a Bangkok music bar Monday, and at least 25 more remain in critical condition after a fire trapped patrons inside. Investigators believe the blaze began with an electrical fault, but they’re focusing on something more familiar: whether blocked exits, flammable interior materials and poor emergency planning turned a survivable fire into a mass-casualty event. Survivors said thick smoke drove people toward the back of the building, where many became trapped in bathrooms because they couldn’t find a way out.

Thailand has seen this story before. A nightclub fire in Bangkok in 2009 killed 67 people and led to promises of tougher enforcement. Yet investigators are again asking whether safety rules existed on paper but not in practice. Entertainment venues rarely become death traps because a fire starts. They become death traps when a series of small safety failures—locked doors, blocked exits, combustible decorations, poor signage—leave people with nowhere to go once it does.

Ukraine Builds a Missile Shield

Ukraine and nine European countries announced a new ballistic-missile-defense coalition in Paris on Monday, a concrete attempt to build the protection Ukraine needs against Russia’s expanding missile campaign. The coalition will coordinate weapons, sensors, training and financing—another sign that European governments increasingly expect the war, and the need to defend against it, to continue.

President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, promised Monday to answer Ukraine’s latest attacks with strikes “several times more powerful,” signaling that he intends to escalate rather than negotiate. As we’ve discussed over the past week, Ukraine has deliberately expanded the battlefield beyond the front lines, striking oil refineries, ports and other infrastructure deep inside Russia in an effort to make the war impossible for ordinary Russians to ignore.

There are signs Ukraine’s strategy is beginning to bite. The Economist reports growing frustration inside Russia over fuel shortages, internet outages and military draft raids. Gallup found a record 60 percent of Russians say their local economy is worsening—the highest level since 2006. Even with higher oil prices from the Iran war, Moscow has cut its own 2026 growth forecast from 1.3 percent to 0.4 percent, while oil and gas revenues fell 45 percent in the first quarter. One produce seller in Rostov summed up the mood: “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.”

Paramount Blockage

The fight over Paramount is no longer just about one company. It’s becoming a test of who gets to police media consolidation when Washington won’t. A bipartisan coalition of twelve state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the deal would reduce competition, eliminate jobs and leave Americans with fewer choices and higher prices for entertainment. The Justice Department has already approved the merger. The Associated Press values the transaction at $81 billion; the Financial Times and others put its enterprise value, including debt, at roughly $110 billion.

The combined company would place CBS and CNN, Paramount Pictures, Paramount+, HBO Max, Warner Bros., DC Studios and two of Hollywood’s major theatrical operations under one corporate roof. Supporters say only companies of that scale can compete with streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube. Opponents argue fewer media companies mean fewer competitors for talent, fewer places to pitch ideas and fewer independent editorial institutions reporting on the government, politics and public life.

Japan Spies.

Donald Trump has long argued that America’s allies should rely less on Washington and do more for themselves. Japan just took him up on it. For the first time since World War II, Japan is creating a centralized intelligence agency to counter threats from China, Russia and accommodate an unpredictable U.S. partner. For a country whose 1947 constitution renounced war and whose wartime secret police left a lasting distrust of domestic surveillance, that represents a remarkable reversal.

Sugar in Space

The universe just got a little sweeter.

Astronomers announced Monday that they’ve found another sugar drifting through the vast clouds of gas and dust between the stars. It’s called erythrulose. On Earth, it’s found in raspberries and even some self-tanners. In space, it floats through the raw material from which new stars and planets eventually form. The discovery didn’t come from a photograph. Using radio telescopes, scientists detected the molecule’s unique pattern of radio frequencies—its chemical fingerprint—and matched it to measurements made in laboratories on Earth.

Scientists aren’t excited because they found dessert in the Milky Way. They’re excited because sugars are among the building blocks of life. DNA itself depends on sugars. Every new one discovered in space strengthens the possibility that the chemistry needed for life isn’t unique to Earth but scattered throughout the galaxy, waiting for the right conditions to assemble itself.

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