Greetings! Happy National Only Child Day to those celebrating.

Let’s get into today’s top stories.

Staying behind on tech trends can be a career killer.

But let’s face it, no one has hours to spare every week trying to stay updated.

That’s why over 200,000 engineers at companies like Google, Meta, and Apple read The Code twice a week.

Here’s why it works:

Join 200,000+ engineers who read The Code to stay ahead of the curve.

🇮🇷 Hormuz is back to being the world’s most expensive threat. American-Iranian talks in Islamabad lasted 21 hours and ended without an agreement. President Trump responded by threatening a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The strait is not a minor choke point: before the war, it handled about 20% of global oil supplies. Any threat there does not stay regional for long, but travels straight into fuel, freight, and inflation. American envoy Steve Witkoff, however, said the talks were constructive. Trump, by contrast, chose coercion over reassurance in his first public comments afterward. Tehran said it would keep charging ships and control passage through the strait. Now, the ceasefire looks procedural rather than durable. The bigger geopolitical surprise is Pakistan, which went from apparent nuclear-armed bystander to indispensable global intermediary. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spent the weekend meeting JD Vance and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Pakistan is now doing what middle powers dream of doing, turning geography into relevance and access into leverage. The world wanted a settlement, but after this weekend, it got a warning label.

🇨🇳 Iran war pulls American strategy eastward and away from Asia. The longer the Middle East burns, the harder it gets for Washington to keep pretending it can focus everywhere at once. The new concern in Asia is not rhetorical. Allies are already feeling the military and political diversion. Senator Jeanne Shaheen said officials in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea raised alarms about the departure of American military assets. Those include missile defense systems from South Korea and a rapid-response Marine unit from Japan. Zack Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute said a longer conflict will pull resources and attention away from Asia. He also warned that future arms sales to the region will suffer. That matters because Trump is supposed to meet Xi Jinping next month. Critics say the war is preventing adequate preparation for a summit where economic interests are on the line. The fear is larger than scheduling. If Beijing concludes that Washington’s attention is thin and its deterrence is stretched, Taiwan starts looking more exposed. NATO chief Mark Rutte even floated the possibility that China could rely on junior partners elsewhere to help divert American focus. The Asia pivot was always easier to announce than to sustain. Now it is colliding with another Middle Eastern reminder that American strategy still gets dragged back by fire.

🗽 Grand Central turns into panic corridor. A man armed with a machete attacked three people at the 42nd Street-Grand Central subway station on Saturday morning. Police then shot and killed him. Officials said the attacks appeared random. The victims were an 84-year-old man, a 65-year-old man, and a 70-year-old woman. None of their injuries were believed to be life-threatening. Even so, one man suffered significant lacerations to the head and face. Another had similar injuries and an open skull fracture. The woman had a shoulder wound. NYPD Comissionner Jessica Tisch said the suspect first slashed one victim on one platform. He then moved upstairs and attacked the others on another platform. The station shut down as police investigated and commuters fled. Beau Lardner, a regular rider, said he heard bangs through his headphones and saw a wall of people rushing through the turnstiles. Trains later resumed after bypassing the station for hours. New York gets sold as resilient because it has to be. But resilience is often just what panic is called after the platforms reopen.

🇺🇸 Mississippi does for America 250 what Washington will not. Mississippi’s contribution to the 250th anniversary of the United States is not coy. It does not pretend the national story can be told cleanly. At the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Lynching Victims Monolith lists more than 600 documented racial killings in the state. The museum’s curators say they were given a simple instruction. Do not whitewash anything. Tell the absolute truth. That bluntness stands in contrast to federal efforts that critics say are scrubbing race and slavery from public history. Mississippi’s own America 250 platform says the state mirrors the national story. It names the removal of Native Americans, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. It also pairs that honesty with a companion exhibit called “Mississippi Made,” which highlights products, industrial achievements, and medical firsts. The point is not self-flagellation. The point is narrative completeness. Even neighboring Alabama’s anniversary material highlights civil rights milestones, but Mississippi’s framing is unusually direct. At a moment when parts of the national government seem to prefer patriotic editing, one of the country’s most burdened and impoverished states is choosing disclosure over myth. That is not self-hatred. It is historical adulthood.

🚰 Corpus Christi finds energy capital without water is a pricey mirage. Years of drought are forcing Corpus Christi to confront a resource hierarchy it long preferred not to test. The city is a major energy port. It is also short on water. That is a dangerous combination in a place whose industrial base includes fuel, polymers, iron, and steel. Officials say those sectors have the least flexibility to simply cut usage. Residents are already under Stage 3 restrictions. That means many outdoor water uses are paused. The city is relying on a long-established conservation plan to buy time. Local officials say they hope they do not reach something worse. They also say hope is not a plan. A possible desalination plant was recommended as far back as 2016, but debate over cost and environmental concerns stalled it. The estimated price rose as high as $1.3B. Now that delay looks less like prudence and more like deferred vulnerability. Corpus Christi has spent years building itself into an indispensable logistics and energy hub. What it did not secure with equal urgency was the basic liquid that lets a city and its industry keep functioning. The result is not an abstract climate warning. It is a port city learning that pipelines and tankers still depend on tap water and its fragile supply.

🛰️ NASA’s moonshot worked, prompting more sequels. Artemis II came home looking like the kind of success the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) badly needed. Astronauts returned from a record-breaking trip around the moon, with extraordinary images, clean splashdown, and earned applause. But the real question begins after the cheers, as NASA already has Artemis III in its sights. Its next mission added to the docket for 2027 will practice docking the Orion capsule with a lunar lander in Earth orbit. That rehearsal is meant to reduce risk before the next landing push. The hardware race is already shaping the schedule. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are competing to get a lander ready first. The docking mechanism is already at Kennedy Space Center. NASA says it will announce the Artemis III crew soon. Longer-term, Artemis IV is aimed at a 2028 moon landing tied to ambitions for a south polar base. Artemis II proved the route. The next phase is no longer about whether the moon is reachable. It is about whether NASA and its commercial partners can turn a triumphant flyby into a reliable operating model for the future of human space travel.

Help better understand our audience. Take this 1-minute survey here so we can provide our community with the best content, news, and stories that matter to you most.

Feel free to reply with your feedback. PM reads and responds to every email. :)

That’s all for today!

Much obliged and many thanks for reading and sharing today’s newsletter.

See you tomorrow!