Cuckoo
Plus: Stay-at-home daughters, stealthers for Senate, and more...
Things heat back up with Iran: Earlier today, Iran attacked U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. These attacks were in response to our own Tuesday attacks on multiple targets within Iran, as well as our revocation of a waiver that had suspended sanctions on the sale of Iranian oil. And all of that was carried out in response, per the Pentagon, to Iranian attacks in the days prior on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.
"To me, I think it's over," President Donald Trump said about the ceasefire, calling the leaders of Iran "cuckoo."
"You want to know the truth?" he told reporters. "They're scum. And, so we don't like them. I don't like them. And they're evil people," he said at a NATO summit in Turkey.
At the same summit, Trump implied he'd like to remain in NATO and reupped his idea that the U.S. should acquire Greenland, saying "Greenland is very important for the United States, but it's not important for Denmark." (Danish leadership pushed back.)
No stealthers for Senate: On the heels of the allegations from Maine woman Jenny Racicot that Democratic candidate for Senate Graham Platner had raped her, another woman added to her account of what Platner had done to her in a former relationship.
Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015 in D.C., and who had previously talked to The New York Times about the domestic abuse she endured from Platner, told The Washington Post that Platner had a history of "stealthing" or unconsensually removing condoms during sex, which was especially upsetting to Fifield as she was not on birth control at the time. Platner's campaign said Fifield's claim was "categorically false and politically motivated."
This week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) revoked her support for Platner, having helped boost him to prominence. Public pressure from high-profile Democrats has been mounting, with calls for Platner to resign. Platner needs to withdraw from the race by July 13, if he wants to do so, and the party must pick a new candidate by July 27. There's no real process, yet, for how to do so, but given the pickle the Democratic Party was in following Joe Biden's replacement search, it seems like they had better come up with some ideas for how to execute these switches a bit better. The New York Times is maintaining a list of possible replacement candidates, but beware: It includes Substacker Heather Cox Richardson.
Dark signs of the times: "Last year, 49% of adults under age 30 said they lived with a parent, up 12 percentage points from 2019, according to the Federal Reserve's latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. Nearly a third of those adults were 25 or older," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Some economists put that figure lower and note that the Fed study doesn't distinguish between children living in their parents' homes versus parents living in their children's homes."
"Far from hiding it, some now broadcast their lives as 'stay-at-home daughters' or 'stay-at-home sons' on social media. [Samantha] Stobo says posting about her mother-daughter living situation on TikTok has earned her a friendly comment section filled with others in the same position—and makes her some money." (Stobo is 33 and has been living with her mother as an adult for three years now.)
These numbers predictably spiked during the pandemic and have gone down a bit since. People blame the poor job market young adults are graduating into (though I would implore them to compare today's with the Great Recession); the high cost of housing in the biggest metro areas (they'll be shocked by this one age-old trick: roommates!); and the high debt with which recent graduates are so often saddled (though maybe you shouldn't get a degree when you don't have a clear value proposition for how you're going to leverage it). No hate at all for stay-at-home mothers (valuable work, if you can get it), but 33-year-old stay-at-home daughters (who make their failure to launch into a TikTok bit) should not become a thing.
Why are parents so willing to be complicit? Doesn't it stunt your 30-year-old if they're not able to go out and meet someone and form a new family of their own? They get the comforts of middle- or upper-middle-class domestic life without ever learning what it takes to build! https://t.co/Zc636IpM9O
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) July 7, 2026
Scenes from New York: I think this part is pretty critical—"place all of the increased burden on the unregulated, market-rate tenants and the owners of buildings with no market rate apartments that can't raise rents forcing them into foreclosure and the buildings into disrepair"—yet so frequently misunderstood by the left.
How to destroy a city.
Win an election by promising half the tenants frozen rents paid for by increased rents on the rest of the city's tenants who often live in the same buildings with their subsidized neighbors. Pit neighbor against neighbor.
Create a city hostile to… https://t.co/P5c80SMlsJ
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) July 8, 2026
QUICK HITS
- Completely agree:
Regarding Michelle Goldberg's mea culpa this morning… I do not say this lightly: If Graham Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics.
Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con… pic.twitter.com/6VKuNCeqBY
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) July 7, 2026
Full column from Michelle Goldberg here, if you're a glutton for punishment.
- "Americans' expectations for inflation over the near and medium term rose in June amid strong increases anticipated for medical care costs and rent, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey released Tuesday," reports Bloomberg. "Consumers said they see inflation at 3.7% over the next year, up from 3.5% in May. Expectations for inflation in three years increased to 3.3%, the highest since June 2022, up from 3.1%. Estimates for inflation in five years remained steady at 3%."
- "A Gallup poll released Tuesday based on a web survey of 5,065 U.S. adults says that 15 percent of U.S. adults reported using GLP-1 medications to lose weight at some point, while 11 percent say they currently are taking them," reports The Washington Post. "That's up from a Gallup poll in 2024 that found 6 percent had ever taken them, and 3 percent were currently on the therapy."
