Welcome to a Hump Day (“ថ្ងៃហ៊ុម” in Khmer): Wednesday, May 13, 2026 and Frog Jumping Day, inspired by Mark Twain’s 1865 story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, whose text you can find here. The Caleveras County still celebrates the story with a competitive frog-jumping contest. You can see a summary below, but it looks a bit cruel, as the frogs have to be scared to jump. (The record, which nabs the yearly $20,000 prize for a first place, is a bit more than 21 feet in three jumps.)
It’s also Cough Drop Day, International Hummus Day, Leprechaun Day, National Apple Pie Day, National Fruit Cocktail Day, Tulip Day, and World Cocktail Day (the Rusty Nail, a mixture of Scotch and Drambuie, was a favorite of Frank Sinatra). Here’s a lovely hummus meal, complete with pita and falafel, that I ate three years ago in Jerusalem:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I don’t know why the rise in inflation is headline news, but it is in both the WSJ and the Washington Post From the WSJ: “Inflation soared to 3.8% in April, driven by gasoline prices.”
There’s a graph from the Labor Department:
An excerpt:
Consumer prices rose 3.8% in April from a year earlier, a clear impact of higher gas prices since the start of the war with Iran.
The Numbers
The figures, reported Tuesday by the Labor Department, surpassed the previous month’s reported increase of 3.3%. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected inflation of 3.7%. The April increase was the highest in three years.
Prices excluding food and energy categories—the so-called core measure economists watch in an effort to better capture inflation’s underlying trend—rose 2.8%. That compared with forecasts for a 2.7% increase, and was a pickup from 2.6% the previous month.
The Big Picture:
High and rising prices have become a flashpoint for Americans, who had expected the steep inflation that hit the U.S. right after the pandemic to be off their plates by now. Price increases have been especially sharp for some items that people buy all the time, like coffee and gas.
Some economists said that the tariffs that President Trump announced a year ago are still slowly filtering through to some goods—but the Iran war, layered on top of that, has presented a much quicker and more obvious shock that could be hard to reverse.
“The American economy has entered a new chapter where inflation appears to have stepped up,” says Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. He predicts the headline rate moving to 4% later this year. “Median American families are going to find it very challenging to adjust going into the second half of the year.”
The 10% is an arbitrary figure for the onset of a “recession,” but the severity of price increases is lower than in 2022-2023. I know I”m entitled and not worried about being poor, but I wonder what the oppressed people of Iran, yearning to breathe free, think when they hear that America may pull out of the war because prices here are too high.
*Speaking of inflation, Trump declares that he wants to pause the federal gasoline tax, which will reduce the price of gas by a huge 18¢ per gallon. The WaPo analyzes what it will mean and who supports or opposes it.
Since the war began in late February, the price of a barrel of Brent crude oil, an international benchmark, has skyrocketed from about $70 to more than $107. U.S. gas prices — now an average of $4.50 a gallon — have reached levels not seen since 2022 and contributed to Trump’s falling approval ratings ahead of the November midterms.
So is a pause on the federal gas tax likely to happen, and would it make a difference to the price you pay at the pump? Here’s what to know.
The answer to the two questions are “probably” and “a little, but not much.”
Prices at the pump incorporate a mixture of federal and state taxes, meaning they can vary sharply between states. The federal tax is 18.3 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.3 cents per gallon on diesel fuel, as well as a “leaking underground storage tank” fee of 0.1 cents per gallon on both fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
State taxes vary, with a national average of 32.6 cents on gasoline and 34.8 cents on diesel, according to the EIA. Factors such as the type of taxes added, where the gas comes from and the ingredients in it can also affect prices, which change daily. The Gulf Coast and southeastern states had the lowest prices in 2024, The Post has reported, partially because of their proximity to refineries.
On Monday, Trump proposed suspending the federal tax for an unspecified period, saying prices would “drop like a rock” once the war ended. Also that day, the Energy Department said it would release 53 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Trump administration had agreed to release a total of 172 million barrels as part of a contribution to the International Energy Agency’s effort to stabilize oil prices, the Energy Department said.
The administration has also lifted restrictions on ships moving fuel between U.S. ports, eased pollution rules regarding ethanol and temporarily waived sanctions on Russian oil. Some states, including Georgia, Utah, Kentucky and Indiana, have moved to suspend or reduce gas taxes in response to rising costs, as have countries such as Canada, Australia and India, according to the IEA.
Ultimately, a great deal hinges on whether or when fuel and commodities resume flowing through the Persian Gulf. If they do, the inflation arithmetic gets easier in a hurry because officials don’t have to worry about second-round effects of higher energy prices and product shortages.
*Reader Norm linked to this tweet in a comment, and calls it “a good analysis that goes against much of the tide about the war. It’s really a long tweet by military expert John Spencer, and worth reading: “Who has the upper hand in Iran?” Some excerpts
One of the strangest habits in modern war analysis is how quickly survival gets confused with victory. Iran has not collapsed overnight. The regime still broadcasts threats, launches missiles and drones, and floods television and social media with declarations of imagined strength. From that surface-level reality, a growing chorus of commentators has rushed to claim that Iran has embarrassed the United States, exposed Israeli weakness, and seized control of escalation through its ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz. Much of that analysis mistakes continued existence for strategic success and ignores nearly every measurable indicator of national power.
Wars are not scored like debates on cable television. They are judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s. By those standards, Iran is substantially weaker today than it was before the war began. The United States and Israel still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced in ways that will take years to rebuild, if they can be rebuilt at all.
The scale of military destruction alone is extraordinary. Much of the senior leadership structure that spent decades constructing Iran’s regional military network is dead. Senior IRGC commanders, missile force leaders, intelligence officials, nuclear scientists, operational planners, and even the Supreme Leader himself have been eliminated. Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, and other senior figures who represented the institutional backbone of Iran’s military strategy are gone. Entire command relationships were shattered during the opening phases of the war, leaving surviving leaders scrambling to maintain continuity while under constant pressure.
The damage extends far beyond personnel losses. Nuclear facilities that represented decades of investment and strategic ambition now sit buried under rubble after sustained strikes on enrichment sites, underground complexes, centrifuge production facilities, research centers, and supporting infrastructure. Analysts continue to speak as though Iran can simply restart enrichment at industrial scale in a matter of months. That misunderstands what was destroyed. Advanced centrifuge production depends on precision manufacturing, specialized tooling, secure facilities, trained personnel, supply chains, and protected infrastructure. Large portions of that ecosystem no longer exist.
Spencer goes on to sum up the damage Iran has suffered, and then concludes this way:
. . . Many analysts want to simplify a deeply complex war into slogans. Iran is winning. America is losing. Trump is trapped. Those narratives often avoid confronting the measurable destruction Iran has suffered, the years required to rebuild its military-industrial base, and the strategic value of preventing a terrorist regime from reaching a no-turning-back threshold in nuclear weapons capability and missile production. They also dismiss the importance of preserving freedom of navigation, protecting regional partners, and degrading a state that spent decades funding terrorism and destabilizing the Middle East.
No one can predict the future with certainty. No analyst possesses a crystal ball capable of forecasting whether the Islamic regime can survive the long-term political and economic consequences of this war. But based on every serious measure of national power, Iran is weaker today than before the conflict began. Its military has been shattered across multiple domains. Its economy is under severe strain. Its proxies are degraded. Its deterrence credibility has suffered. Its strategic ambitions have been rolled back. The United States and its partners still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced, and rebuilding them may take far longer than many observers are willing to admit.
Yes, but when they rebuild they can still make nuclear weapons, export terror, and oppress the Iranian people. Is that what we call a “win”?
*In the NYT’s morning newsletter, not on the paper’s website, Sam Sifton discusses the issue who owns the Strait of Hormuz. The narrowest point of the strait is 24 mi (39 km) with Iran on one side and Oman on the other.
Scholars have argued for centuries that no state can lay claim to the high seas, the ocean common. One jurist from the Dutch Golden Age came up with a term for it: mare liberum, or free sea.
Which is fine out in the middle of an ocean. It gets a little more complicated closer to shore, and particularly with choke points like the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, the United States has argued that it has a right to freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, in contrast, has said that it can regulate traffic there.
By what right? Can a nation declare the waters off its coastline as its own? How far out do those waters extend?
I picked up some light reading: “Legal Vortex in the Strait of Hormuz,” a 2014 paper by James Kraska, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. It could have been written much more recently — like, in February. We spoke yesterday. Kraska has seen this conflict coming for more than a decade.
What’s going on in the strait is fundamentally a legal dispute, he told me. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a kind of international constitution for the oceans, governs passage there. Neither Washington nor Tehran has ratified it, but it reflects “customary international law,” which means it is still supposed to be binding, Kraska told me.
In other words, Iran can claim that its territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from its shoreline, which is permitted by the treaty, but only if it recognizes the right of free navigation through those waters. (Free navigation, Kraska noted. Charging a toll, as Iran hopes to do, would break the law.)
Kraska told me about a similar conflict between Britain and Albania in the late 1940s, over the channel between Greece and the island of Corfu. In an effort to control that strait, Albania fired on Royal Navy warships. Mines in the strait killed dozens of sailors. It didn’t lead to war. The case became the first one adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. It ruled that Britain enjoyed the right to sail through and that Albania had a duty to keep the strait clear of mines.
Albania, a less powerful nation than Iran, complied. The precedent may end there.
It looks like what Iran is claiming is illegal, at least according to the UN’s dicta. But don’t expect Iran to obey that law.
*Many universities have land acknowledgements, but few do anything more than say they exist on stolen land. But a few have gone further, trying to give reparations to the Native Americans whom they say they displaced (sometimes, though, they didn’t “displace” anyone). Harvard was one of those that tried, but it turned into a mess, as described in the new FP article, “How Harvard’s reparation plan flopped.”
[In 2019] Harvard University took up the cause when Harvard president Lawrence Bacow convened a faculty committee to excavate the university’s historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
The committee, chaired by Harvard Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, ultimately produced a 134-page report confirming the ugly truth that Harvard, like many institutions in the North, was run by slaveowners—among them four university presidents—and that its professors had advanced so-called race science, including eugenics, to justify the trade.
The report, issued in 2022, called on the school to “take responsibility for its past” and “leverage its strengths in the pursuit of meaningful repair.”
The university then established what it called the “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” which aimed to “remedy harms to descendants, to our community and the nation, and to campus life and learning.” It committed an extraordinary $100 million to the initiative and promoted Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy, to vice provost for special projects to shepherd the effort.
What followed was a cascade of institutional embarrassments: high-profile resignations, the dismissal of an entire research team, a string of HR complaints, and a rebuke from Antigua’s ambassador to the United States. And so far at least, its signature effort—to find descendants of people Harvard had enslaved and then do something for them, presumably financially—has failed miserably.
Harvard, of course, was hardly unique among universities in launching an ambitious racial justice project in the late 2010s and early 2020s. But in its scope and cost, its undertaking surpassed anything adopted by its Ivy League peers. The nine-figure initiative was billed as “unprecedented.”
And so was its failure. In retrospect, that should hardly have been a surprise. Like other battle cries that emerged in the past decade—Black Lives Matter or Defund the Police, for instance—the idea of reparations, whatever its merits, struggled to offer a defined, achievable outcome. And even Harvard, with its $57 billion endowment, couldn’t square that contradiction.
Not everything that came out of the Harvard initiative was a failure. The 2022 report put forth seven recommendations. The more straightforward ones included forging partnerships with historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs), and developing educational opportunities for marginalized youth. In early 2024, it established the Du Bois Scholars Program, which offers summer research internships at Harvard to students from select HBCUs, and it has funded job readiness programs for unemployed adults in Cambridge and Boston.
Beyond that, positive results were hard to come by.
The problem is that for Harvard there could be 30,000 descendants of slaves held by people associated with the University.
The reckoning that Harvard once promised has since morphed into something the university may not be able to achieve. If the number of living descendants indeed reaches 30,000, Harvard’s $100 million commitment works out to $3,333 per person before a dollar is spent on the rest of the initiative’s ambitious projects. Should the university seriously fulfill its pledge of “engagement,” which includes “educational support,” the math becomes difficult: At Harvard, for example, a four-year degree costs upward of $380,000.
Harvard is “already hedging” its initiative, and any meaningful reparations are not going to happen. Still, there’s a better case for reparations for slavery than there is for reparations for “occupying Native American land” given that we don’t know the entire history of early American tribes or prehistoric settlers. However, I’ve never heard a convincing argument about why people like me, whose ancestors were in Eastern Europe during slavery and had no connection with the odious institution, should pay for what Americans did from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili likes her dinosaurs bite-sized:
Hili: Dinosaurs adorned themselves with feathers.
Andrzej: But thank goodness, they ended up smaller.
In Polish:
Hili: Dinozaury przystroiły się w piórka.
Ja: Ale na całe szczęście zmalały.
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From Funny and Strange Signs:
From The Dodo Pet; a Limulus costume:
Masih highlights an Iranian protestor who lost both eyes when the authorities shot her in the face. The video is six minutes long with English subtitles. If you can’t see the tweet below (for some reason it’s unembeddable), go to the site and video here.
“He fired as if swatting a fly.”
Farideh says the last image burned into her mind was the face of the man who shot her in the eyes.
Not in war. Not on a battlefield. On a street in Sanandaj.
Farideh Salavatipour lost both eyes because a regime looked at a woman demanding… pic.twitter.com/4nwHYC1RIm— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 12, 2026
From Luana (who got her Ph.D. at Cornell); a group at the school whose sole purpose seems to be causing disruption to further their ideology:
The “Sunrise” movement is listed as an official group at Cornell University, where protestors recently staged a “bird dog” on the President of the school. https://t.co/9yvXOcuZlQ
— Paul Rossi, anti-maxxer (@pauldrossi) May 11, 2026
I found this optical illusion on X. Yes, the lines are straight.
This is called the the bulging checkerboard illusion. pic.twitter.com/9vOOY18hWd
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 11, 2026
From Emma. To be sure, I don’t mind being reclined on without the recliner asking me:
Wait until you get reclined on, peer over, and realise I’m short with no immediate need to ‘free the legs’. https://t.co/ULKVqchxvs
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 12, 2026
One from my feed:
Pigcasso! She raised over a million dollars for her sanctuary with her paintings, and George Clooney owns one. https://t.co/otfnM5aHjV
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 12, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was not yet one year old, and would have been 83 had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T10:35:40.545Z
. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, sound up to hear this porcupine:
Up-close with Ozzy chomping on a lemon slice and some yams. Sound on! 🔊📹: Prehensile-tailed porcupine by zookeepers Brooke and Elsa
— Zoo Boise (@zooboise.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T14:26:21.665Z
A “sea angel”: a gorgeous predatory sea slug:
Witness the mesmerizing sea angel (*Clione* sp.), a real-life creature gliding beneath the ice of the White Sea. Captured by Alexander Semenov, this beauty is no illusion.
— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T06:11:46.000Z