Lindsey Graham's death is drawing sharp retrospectives. Wajahat Ali pulls no punches, calling him a man who went to his grave declaring the man he once called a xenophobe and demagogue was 'not far behind God.' Rick Wilson goes further, calling Graham a 'power addict' who defined himself entirely by proximity to dominant figures — first McCain, then Trump — and says the warm bipartisan tributes deserve 'colder eyes.' Meanwhile, Trump's response was to tell NBC and CNN he was worried Graham's death might derail his SAVE Act voter-suppression bill — behavior Zeteo's Martin Pengelly puts in context alongside Trump's comment about Robert Mueller's death: "Good, I'm glad he's dead."

The rest of U.S. foreign policy is spiraling fast. Zeteo reports Trump's lethal bombing campaign targeting boats in the Caribbean and Pacific has killed at least 221 people across 66+ strikes, with a senior U.S. official describing it as 'murder for murder's sake' — internal data shows it isn't working, and the White House has stopped asking for effectiveness metrics. On the Iran front, the ceasefire has collapsed into what Iranian officials call a 'crisis phase' — the two sides traded heavy strikes over the weekend, Iran is claiming control of the Strait of Hormuz, and only 14 ships transited the strait in a day. Meanwhile, extremist settler violence in the West Bank is hitting record levels — including the detention of Rep. Ro Khanna by armed settlers.

The AI industry is having a messy week. Apple sued OpenAI over alleged hardware trade secret theft by poached employees, OpenAI's head of safety is out as the company restructures ahead of a likely IPO with Greg Brockman consolidating power, and Tencent is reportedly moving to acquire AI agent startup Manus after Chinese regulators killed Meta's deal. WIRED also flags that AI caught a critical Linux flaw that had gone undetected for 15 years, and Microsoft's carbon emissions jumped 25% from data center power demand. Milk Road AI, meanwhile, argues Eli Lilly is running the Google playbook — reinvesting drug revenue into AI infrastructure and drug discovery platforms — with one analyst projecting the stock goes from $1,200 to $5,000.

Renee DiResta's deep dive on the Springfield pet-eating rumor is worth your time: she traces how JD Vance and allies deliberately circulated a debunked claim about Haitian immigrants and then reframed corrections as bias — her conclusion: institutions can't answer a system engineered to undermine institutional legitimacy with a press release. In other reads: 404 Media's Joseph Cox bought a $3,000 electromuscular stimulation suit celebrity-endorsed by George Clooney, got pins and needles in his extremities for days, and is sending it back. Art in America flags UNESCO reviewing a 100-foot black cube threatening Florence's World Heritage skyline and the European Commission recommending pulling €2 million from the Venice Biennale over Russia's participation. And Anika Meier argues that NFTs democratized market entry for digital artists but left them isolated from art history — context doesn't make work important, she writes, but it makes that importance legible to institutions. Rendering Unconscious has Bryan Batista-Thomas on his new Laplanche book collecting interviews with psychoanalysts worldwide on clinical practice; Seth Godin reflects on the hedonic treadmill and why luxury goods don't actually improve our lives; and Amanda's Mild Takes covers a Daylight Saving Time bill back from the dead and a new foreign-money-in-elections measure. China also recovered its first reusable rocket using a novel SpaceX-adjacent method, per Ars Technica. Vanessa Sinclair and the RU Center for Psychoanalysis are marking a one-year anniversary with a live podcast event July 18th, and Dr. Sinclair's latest essay connects Brion Gysin's cut-up method to Lacanian psychoanalysis as a tool for deconstructing internalized social structures.