The most unsettling thread today is the Iran situation. The Handbasket's author captures those three days in April when Trump's Truth Social posts threatened nuclear strikes on Iran and set a deadline to open the Strait — and Iranian civilians were forming human chains around power plants. A last-minute ceasefire pulled things back, but the author's argument is that the line between Trump's rhetoric and actual policy is now functionally gone — which tracks with Reason's observation that Lindsey Graham has somehow landed on the position that the president can start wars but only Congress can end them. Meanwhile, Iran has been demanding cryptocurrency tolls on oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz — confirmed by the WSJ — and WIRED found the pro-Iran meme machine already running AI-generated Lego cartoons mocking U.S. policy since the conflict began.

The civil liberties beat is busy. The FBI apparently went after the Army staffer who leaked info about special operations corruption — the Fort Bragg Cartel story — raising obvious retaliation concerns, while separately WIRED found the bureau didn't answer texts from Minnesota investigators for days during an active killing case. On the surveillance front, Florida wildlife police have been doing Flock camera plate lookups for ICE despite no direct contract, and a federal court is about to hear Chatrie v. United States, which could reshape digital privacy rights for millions. The FBI can also reportedly recover deleted Signal messages from iPhone push notification databases — which is why there's a trans digital self-defense workshop in Queens teaching people to scrub their personal data from the internet.

The right-to-repair and AI accountability stories are converging in interesting ways. John Deere just agreed to a $99 million settlement for its repair monopoly practices — advocates say it's not enough, but the momentum is real — while data center tech lobbyists are actively trying to roll back repair law and Maine is moving toward a datacenter moratorium entirely. Reason calls the anti-datacenter backlash mostly incoherent given the economic benefits, and the WSJ found that anti-datacenter activists were using ChatGPT to organize their opposition. On the AI accountability side, OpenAI is backing an Illinois bill that would shield AI companies from liability even for mass casualties or financial disasters — and Meta's new health AI was already caught asking for raw health data and giving dangerous advice in return.

The art world is reshuffling. The Hirshhorn's director Melissa Chiu is leaving for the Guggenheim — another Smithsonian exit — while MoMA's photography curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo is heading to The Met. The Getty Center announced it's closing for renovations starting 2027, works from Marian Goodman's collection are anchoring Christie's May sales, and Expo Chicago downsized from 170 to 130 exhibitors this year — a move dealers universally praised for raising presentation quality. Outside institutional churn, a Russian museum director fled to Berlin after maintaining an artistic space under authoritarian pressure in Perm, and Japan's ambassador is pushing back on a planned comfort women statue in Auckland over WWII.