Saturday, March 28, 2026 · 146 newsletters

Hormuz Holds Wall Street

iran-war · hormuz · markets-correction · dhs-shutdown · anthropic-pentagon · social-media-verdicts · ai-agents · california-debate · peptides · sora-dead

Published on Saturday, March 28, 2026.

Pulled from 146 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. Brent crude jumped to $112 a barrel, the Nasdaq 100 fell into a correction, Trump extended his Iran deadline to April 6, the Senate cut a deal to reopen most of DHS without ICE, an Iran-linked group dumped FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email online, and a federal judge stopped the Trump administration from blacklisting Anthropic. Two California juries punched a hole in Section 230. Here's the signal cut from the noise, organized by trend.

Iran War: The Strait Is "Open in Theory, Controlled in Reality"

This was the dominant thread again by a wide margin. Bloomberg's evening briefing led with markets cratering as the Nasdaq 100 entered a correction (down more than 10% from its last record), the S&P 500 off 1.7%, and economists raising US inflation estimates above 3% for the year. Brent crude jumped to $112 a barrel as Iran kept turning tankers away from Hormuz. Bloomberg's morning brief had Iran and Israel still exchanging missile fire and Tehran targeting Gulf states even after Trump's latest push for peace talks.

Trump extended the deadline, again. John Ellis at News Items had Trump pushing the deadline for striking Iran's energy plants to April 6, claiming on Truth Social that he was "pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction" at Tehran's request. George Bounacos at Gov Brief Today noted Iran insists on Hormuz control regardless. Semafor DC's afternoon read flagged that Brent is up 55.6% since the war started, while their morning edition framed the up-and-down approach as deliberate misdirection, with Shelby Talcott reporting Trump is considering deploying up to 10,000 additional ground troops and that seizing Iran's Kharg Island oil export hub "just became more than a definite maybe."

The military is not as ready as people thought. Paul Krugman wrote the most useful frame: "The Worst and the Dumbest." His point is that the unprepared strategy was the expected disaster, but the unfavorable surprise is that the U.S. military itself does not appear ready for drone warfare. US bases in the region "appear to be sort of completely unprotected," he said, after years of watching Ukraine. Rick Wilson's Friday Brief put his money on war this weekend, not because of strategic necessity but because "war isn't the extension of politics by other means. It's the ultimate season finale." Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark tracked Trump 9.9 points underwater on the war in the RealClearPolitics average, with 41 approving and 51 disapproving.

The economic windfalls and second-order effects. Matt Klein at The Overshoot had the cleanest read on who actually benefits: at current prices, Russia's energy-related tax revenues are running about 3x the December-February average, with total oil and gas tax receipts potentially hitting $180 billion in 2026, up from $101 billion in 2025. Casey Lewis at After School caught the consumer angle that gas pushing $4 a gallon is hitting Gen Z hardest, since they are the only generation that has not seen gasoline spending as a share of consumption fall from pre-pandemic levels. Brian Beutler at Off Message had the day's most disturbing thread: a DOJ accidental document production revealed prosecutors believed Trump stole classified documents including "planning documents for war against Iran" for personal profit, while Trump loyalists ousted the SEC's top enforcement official and someone bet hundreds of millions on oil prices dropping.

Foreign Affairs went all-in. Foreign Affairs Today ran Richard Betts and Stephen Biddle on "The Price of Strategic Incoherence in Iran," Ellie Geranmayeh on whether either side can dictate ceasefire terms, and James Jeffrey on how America can avoid a Russian-style quagmire. Their weekly edition led with Ilan Goldenberg arguing Trump needs an off-ramp, Odd Arne Westad invoking "the specter of 1914" on Trump and Xi, and Matthew Levitt asking if Iran will turn to terrorism. Anand Giridharadas at The Ink hosted Scott Anderson, author of King of Kings, on what the U.S. keeps failing to learn from past Iran experiences.

Politics: The Shutdown Ends (Mostly), Trump's Polling Cratered

The DHS shutdown is over. Semafor DC had the Senate approving a deal early Friday to reopen almost all of the Department of Homeland Security, exempting ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection. Democrats did not get the immigration enforcement changes they demanded; Republicans did not get additional ICE funding. Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger framed it as a clean Republican capitulation, given that Trump spent the last week haranguing his party to reject all deals and blow up the filibuster. Semafor's earlier afternoon edition caught the House GOP rejecting the Senate deal in favor of an eight-week funding bill, ensuring more chaos.

ICE's continued credibility implosion. Paul Krugman's second piece opened with the observation that Trump's ICE-at-the-airport-Cinnabons move may end up reminding Americans how much they dislike ICE, even as administration crackdowns make immigration plunge. He cited a new PRRI poll showing approval for Trump's immigration handling sharply declining even among Republicans, and G. Elliott Morris finding that ICE commands so little public trust "it's in a category of its own." Adrian Carrasquillo at The Bulwark wrote on The Pitt's ICE-raid episode as the moment prestige TV stopped pretending the topic was avoidable.

Trump's invisible ceiling. Brian Daitzman at Lincoln Square made the cleanest structural argument: Trump's approval among independents sits in the high 20s across multiple polls. "A presidency can be dominant within its own party and still be weak in the country as a whole." Lincoln Square's polling show with Rick Wilson and Andrew Wilson had Trump at 36% overall in Reuters/Ipsos, 41% underwater on cost of living, and bleeding among non-college-educated white men. Matt Berg at Crooked's What A Day shifted focus to California, where eight Democrats refuse to drop out of the governor's race and the two Republicans are leading the jungle primary, raising the real possibility of a GOP-on-GOP general. The USC debate that might have helped collapsed in racial controversy after the university invited six candidates, all white. Meg Schwenzfeier and Jack Welty at FWIW covered the same race from the AI angle with Caucus AI, their tracker for what ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini are telling voters.

Redistricting wars continue. Democracy Docket's Friday edition had Utah Republicans' effort to legalize partisan gerrymandering failing to qualify for the ballot, while a Missouri pro-voter challenge cleared a milestone. Marc Elias covered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a former Oath Keeper running for California governor, seizing more than 650,000 ballots from the state's 2025 redistricting referendum based on a 45,000-vote alleged discrepancy that the county registrar says is actually 103. Lincoln Square's Edwin Eisendrath show had Adam Klasfeld at the Atlanta County Courthouse on the FBI's Fulton County election raid hearing.

AI: Anthropic Week (For Real This Time)

The single biggest sub-story across categories. The Information AM reported Anthropic discussing a Q4 IPO and prepping a new advanced model called "Claude Mythos." Tech Brew called it "Anthropic all the way down," with Dario Amodei describing Mythos as "by far the most powerful AI model we've ever developed" per a leak Fortune confirmed. Fortune Tech ran the most detail. The same day, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration's attempt to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk: Axios AI+ Government reported Sam Altman told staff he was trying to "save" his competitor while the Pentagon negotiations were collapsing, and Tech Brew noted Judge Rita Lin's order temporarily blocking the blacklisting. Bill Kristol tied the two stings together as "two giant Ls" landing on the White House in twelve hours.

OpenAI picks a lane. Aakash Gupta at Product Growth led with the consolidation story most cleanly: OpenAI exited the video generation business entirely, killing the Sora app, Sora API, and Disney's $1B deal. The Sora team is being redirected to robotics. "OpenAI looked at where every dollar of market growth was coming from and saw the answer: coding and enterprise." Total Sora consumer revenue since September was $1.4M. Ben Thompson at Stratechery eulogized it as "So Long to Sora." App Economy Insights framed it as OpenAI killing all "side quests" to copy the Anthropic playbook: one app, code and chat, enterprise focus. The Information had OpenAI surpassing $100M in annualized revenue from its ads pilot.

Anthropic is the agent leader. App Economy Insights and Aakash Gupta both flagged Claude Code and Cowork now taking direct control of your computer via a "Dispatch" feature, where you assign a complex task from your phone and come back to a finished deliverable. Perplexity launched its own "Computer" that orchestrates 19 AI models. OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberg joined OpenAI.

Builders are getting opinionated. Linas Beliūnas wrote a deep guide to the .claude/ directory and Boris Cherny's actual CLAUDE.md. Kieran Flanagan made the case that every marketing team needs at least one Claude Code-pilled builder running a custom MCP server. Guillermo Flor at Product Market Fit broke down the agency-agents repo (147 agents, 64.2k stars). Maja Voje at GTM Strategist showed how Jordan Crawford uses Claude Code to write outbound emails that intelligent life would actually reply to. Richard King at the Product Marketing Drop and Crissy Saunders at Cooking Up GTM both wrote how-tos on Claude Skills for product marketing and Salesforce audits. The "Claude Code pilled" tag is the new "vibecoder."

Apocaloptimism. Byron Gilliam at The Breakdown wrote the most useful AI-doomerism piece of the week, "Apocaloptimism," using The AI Doc's theatrical release to argue that doom warnings are losing their shock value. Andrej Karpathy conceded AI is not that good at writing code yet ("the agents do not listen to my instructions"). Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark dismissed his own "50% of entry-level jobs" warning on a podcast. Jay Van Bavel at The Power of Us hosted a panel with Jonathan Haidt and the film's producer that landed on "watch the documentary, but don't watch it alone." Big Think's Shai Tubali, in his "How not to become like AI" series, used Christof Koch's reflections on AI-partner retreats to argue that lonely people outsourcing emotional needs to chatbots is the real near-term consciousness problem.

Apple, Google, others. TLDR had Apple opening Siri to rival AI assistants in iOS 27, ending OpenAI's monopoly on the Siri integration. The Neuron caught Google shipping "more AI in a day than most companies ship in a quarter," including a compression breakthrough being nicknamed "Pied Piper." Stacked Marketer had Meta launching new AI video tools across Reels and Catalog. Bloomberg Technology ran Macy's saying its new AI chatbot users spend "about 400% more online."

Big Tech on Trial: Section 230 Cracks Open

Two California juries this week handed down what Chartr called a possible "Big Tobacco moment" for Big Tech. Chartr's full read had a Los Angeles jury awarding $6M to a 20-year-old plaintiff, with Meta on the hook for 70% and Google for the rest. The Daily Upside framed the strategy: plaintiffs sidestepped Section 230 by pegging accountability to platform design, not content. The Publish Press hit the same beat, noting the case follows Meta being ordered to pay $375M in New Mexico the day before. Hannah Doyle and Syd Cohen tracked the creator-economy implications. International Intrigue called the global implications "remarkable."

The legal scaffolding. Nita Farahany wrote a beautifully precise 46-page-opinion explainer of the Ninth Circuit's second remand of California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, providing the actual roadmap legislators need to write something that survives. Mike Solana at Pirate Wires suggested the better remedy is the ancient legal doctrine of public shaming. Congress is now in motion: Axios AI+ Government caught Senator Josh Hawley calling for a chatbot ban for minors and Senator Kat Cammack disagreeing, with Bernie Sanders separately filing his AI data center moratorium bill.

Cybersecurity: Patel's Personal Inbox Goes Public

Techmeme led with the day's most embarrassing story: Iran-linked hacker group Handala dumped FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email contents online, 1.06GB ranging from 2010 to 2022. The FBI confirmed the breach but called the data "historical in nature." Senator Ruben Gallego pointed out that Patel had laid off half of the FBI's Cyber Division last year and fired the very agents tracking Iranian threats just days before the war started. SpyTalk had a related thread on NYPD intelligence chief Rebecca Ulam Weiner ramping security as the FBI warned California police that Iran could retaliate with drones on the West Coast, and unidentified drones were already seen over Ft. McNair in DC.

Markets and Money: SpaceX IPO, Kleiner's $3.5B, Crypto's Pivot

The Daily Upside led with Reuters reporting Elon Musk considering allocating as much as 30% of SpaceX's IPO to retail investors, about three times typical. TLDR noted SpaceX is targeting a mid-June IPO aimed at $40-$80B raised. Tesla is down nearly 17% this year. Newcomer had the cleanest narrative on Silicon Valley's complete embrace of industrial policy, with Jamie Dimon endorsing it at the Hill & Valley Forum: "I think you have to use industrial policy now," even as he "reluctantly" came to that view. Fortune Term Sheet tracked Kleiner Perkins landing $3.5B in early and growth funds as Mamoon Hamid's comeback builds.

Crypto's reset. Bankless covered prediction market insider trading bans, with a U.S. presidential hopeful pushing state-level prohibitions. The Breakdown's Byron Gilliam cited Jevons' paradox to argue AI use will keep growing even if its productivity gains underwhelm. Pirate Wires ran defense of Anduril after a Wired exposé, arguing the F-35 has been "glacial" for 20 years and Anduril is just trying to deliver. Niko at Collateral had a private markets RIA case study with quiet utility on building digital PR for allocator scrutiny.

China and the World

Trivium China reported Beijing launching two reciprocal trade probes after Commerce Minister Wang Wentao met US Trade Rep Jamieson Greer in Cameroon. Their podcast unpacked how Beijing views the Iran situation, including how a decade of building commodity reserves has now been vindicated. Jordan Schneider at ChinaTalk hosted Jen Pahlka on whether AI can actually fix government bureaucracy, where the real obstacles are political rather than technical. Maritime Analytica had ten data points on how China has quietly become the center of global maritime shipping, with ~320M gross tons of commercial shipping, $255B in fleet value, now larger than Greece's fleet for the first time.

Healthcare, Wellness, Vibe Shifts

Snacks at Robinhood had the day's most consequential consumer story: Health Secretary RFK Jr. is reportedly poised to allow compounding pharmacies to dispense peptides currently restricted by the FDA. The peptide therapeutics market is already $52B globally and projected to hit $87B by 2035. Search interest in "peptides" has surpassed "ozempic." Dan Go wrote on the Backwards Law from Navy SEAL drownproofing. Sahil Bloom wrote on the 85% rule. Nautilus on how walking pace predicts mortality. Neil Pasricha on the cat-on-arm feeling. The wellness underground continues to gain political and regulatory ground.

Sacra, Newcomer, App Economy: The Funded Side

Jan-Erik Asplund at Sacra wrote the cleanest deal note of the day: Danone bought Huel for $1.15B. Huel generated $335M in revenue in the TTM ending July 2025, up 22% YoY. Sacra's contrast between Soylent (engineer efficiency hack) and Huel (mainstream UK time-poor professional) is the kind of category framing that explains why one was acquirable and one was not. Steven Schlafman at Where the Road Bends returned after five months with an essay on pruning apple trees that doubles as venture-philosophy. Rob Snyder wrote on "customer language" as distinct from demand language, the kind of distinction that prevents a lot of bad B2B marketing. Paul Stansik at Hello Operator had one of those quietly excellent operator posts: 95%+ of business problems have been solved before, the hard part is making it happen.

Lifestyle and Culture Grace Notes

Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs wrote the definitive Q&A on the Lindy West / polyamory discourse so you do not have to read all 47 other takes. Emily Sundberg at Feed Me covered the new play about the death of Dimes Square, "Lip Filler Accent" as a new speech pattern, and the launch of Wardrobe, Louis Cheslaw's new menswear newsletter (cross-promoted in Why Is This Interesting?). Vittles' Dina Begum reviewed Bangla City in Upton Park, a Boxpark-style food court that materialized overnight as one of London's most significant Bangladeshi food hubs. Eater NY gave away $200 at Anbā. PUNCH ran archival best-new-bartender cocktails. Artforum covered the death of painter Pat Steir at 87. Om Malik wrote a fierce obituary for Google Fiber after Stonepeak took it over, complete with a quotable line: Google is "a financially optimized extraction machine run the McKinsey way." coolstuff.nyc covered new Georgian bakery openings in Bushwick and Chelsea. The Storm Skiing Journal wrote a love letter to Plattekill that doubled as a great essay on the kind of friend who keeps lists of every haircut he's ever had.

Three Takeaways for You

The Hormuz war is no longer a Middle East story, it is a markets and politics story. The Nasdaq is in a correction, Brent is at $112, inflation expectations are above 3%, the DHS shutdown ended on Republican terms, and Trump's approval is structurally underwater with independents. The regime-change observation from May is now active: sticky inflation plus weakening equities plus war plus political dysfunction is a combo showing up in financial, political, and consumer newsletters at the same time.

The AI conversation has cleanly bifurcated into two camps. The doomers are losing their shock value (per The Breakdown, Karpathy's capitulation, Jack Clark's quiet retreat) while the operators are getting much more specific about workflow. Anthropic discussing an IPO, beating OpenAI to coding revenue, beating OpenAI in the Pentagon courts, and prepping "Claude Mythos" while OpenAI kills Sora and consolidates is the clearest market-share story since this race started. If you build with these tools, the "Claude Code pilled" pieces from Linas, Kieran Flanagan, and Maja Voje are where the actual practice is being written down.

If you only read three pieces, I would suggest: Paul Krugman's "The Worst and the Dumbest" (the most useful frame for what is going wrong militarily), The Breakdown's "Apocaloptimism" (the cleanest current read on AI doom narratives losing altitude), and Brian Beutler's "Expose ALL Of Trump's War Profiteering" (the most under-covered scandal of the week, hiding in plain sight in a DOJ document dump).