6/30 to 7/6, 2025

This is This Week, Basically, hosted by Robyn Davies. I’m your friendly chaos-condenser — taking the week’s heavy politics, thorny policy, and weird culture, and turning it into one clean, caffeinated update. Big picture first, dessert later. Let’s roll.

We’ll start in the Middle East, where power and isolation are walking hand in hand. An analysis out of London argues that Israel has muscled its way to the safest strategic position in its 76-year history; crippling or cowing regional foes from Hamas and Hezbollah to the Houthis, striking deep in Iran, and shoring up ties with Gulf states. The flip side? A reputational crater. The Gaza campaign’s devastating toll, accusations of war crimes, and bruising global polls have pushed Israel toward pariah status in many democracies — and split the once-automatic U.S. consensus in its favor. Inside Israel, families of hostages say military “wins” ring hollow without returns; abroad, boycotts and protests have surged. More secure at home, more isolated abroad. That’s the uneasy new equilibrium. 

Tucked inside that story is the hardware that made parts of it possible — and a person behind the tech. Meet Anh Duong, nicknamed “the Bomb Lady,” a Vietnamese refugee who grew up to lead a U.S. Navy team that developed a high-heat penetrator explosive in the same family as the bunker-buster used on Iran’s underground nuclear sites. The recent strikes featured the Massive Ordnance Penetrator on Fordo and Natanz; Duong won’t referee the Pentagon-Israel debate over “months” versus “years” of setback. But she underscores a practical point: when you bomb deep-embedded facilities, it can take a long time to know what you actually achieved. In the lab, she says, it’s never one person; it’s a small community of engineers pushing the chemistry forward, weapon by weapon. 

Across the Atlantic, a different kind of power story: money. Newly reviewed business records suggest Donald Trump’s finances were wobbling right up to his second presidential run; office towers short on rent, golf courses short on players, big legal judgments circling — and then the pivot. After he clinched the nomination, the family business leaned hard into monetizing the name: crypto ventures, brand partnerships, merch, deals with partners eager to bank on his return. The kicker is the conflict line: as president, he’s both crypto’s chief regulator and a crypto partner. Detractors call it a money grab; supporters say it’s legal entrepreneurship. Either way, the documents paint a portrait of a company moving from classic development toward licensing, influence, and the gray zones in between. 

North to Canada, where the new prime minister’s mantra “Build, baby, build” is hitting a constitutional wall. Mark Carney wants to fast-track projects of “national interest” to speed an economic reset away from U.S. dependency: ports, grids, rail, mines, even nuclear. Indigenous nations say: not without us. Leaders of First Nations in Quebec and beyond are demanding a seat at the table — in some cases, a veto — over projects planned on their ancestral lands. Parliament has already greenlit an “accelerated process,” but Indigenous and environmental groups say debate was rushed and consultation is non-negotiable. Expect fights in court, blockades on logging roads, and a test of whether “reconciliation” is rhetoric or a real share of power. 

Meanwhile, U.S.–EU trade turbulence hits the closet: 50,000 French Breton stripes are sitting in a warehouse in Normandy instead of heading to Nordstrom and J.Crew. Saint James, the 19th-century maker of those blue-and-white sailor knits, has parked an entire U.S. export season while Trump’s tariff threats whipsaw rates from 10% to 20% to 50%. You can absorb a surprise duty for a quarter; you can’t plan a business on “yo-yo politics.” The European Commission is racing to cut a deal; executives are pricing in delays and passing costs to customers. It’s the unglamorous end of geopolitics: when trade policy zigzags, the sweaters don’t ship. 

Back home, a quieter crisis: smoke you can’t see. After the January wildfires in and around Los Angeles, families who thought they were “the lucky ones” — homes still standing — came back to couches laced with cyanide, kitchen air spiked with acetaldehyde, drywall that swabbed positive for char and ash. Insurance companies often won’t pay for comprehensive testing; when they do, the panels may be too narrow to catch the toxics researchers worry about. California’s insurance commissioner has stood up a task force to set standards on smoke claims, but for now, many homeowners are stuck choosing between health and finances — move back into a chemically compromised house, or pay out of pocket for the forensic clean-up that might make it livable. 

Policy lab of the week goes to Australia, which is attempting something other countries only tweet about: ban kids from social media. A new nationwide law sets a hard minimum age of 16, with big fines for platforms that fail to verify users’ ages. The catch? The definitions and mechanics aren’t settled — YouTube’s status is ambiguous, the rules for compliance are still being drafted, and the government’s large age-verification trial hasn’t been fully published. Australia’s online-safety chief admits they’re “building the plane while flying it,” and neighboring countries are drafting copycat bills. If Canberra sticks the landing, expect a wave of similar laws; if it stumbles, tech firms will make that case global. 

Now to New York City, where a mayoral front-runner’s college application is the new Rorschach test for race, identity, and admissions. Zohran Mamdani — Ugandan-born, South Asian, Muslim — checked “Asian” and “Black or African American” on a 2009 Columbia University application, according to data exposed in a recent hack. He says he doesn’t consider himself Black, but the form’s boxes didn’t fit his background; he also wrote in “Ugandan.” He wasn’t admitted. There’s no record of him identifying as Black in speeches or interviews, and the hacked database spans millions of applicants, not a targeted search. But the primary winner’s decades-old checkboxes have now become a proxy war over affirmative action, identity politics, and the blunt instruments we use to sort people who don’t fit neatly in the grids. 

A quick pivot back to foreign policy hardware and its human aftershocks, because the dots do connect. When you decide great-power questions by force, you inherit long tails: diplomatic blowback, courts testing the edges of executive power, and, yes, supply chains with frozen sweaters. The machinery of the state, the chemistry of the bomb, the economics of the brand, the rights of the nations within nations; it’s all system-level stuff. And every one of those systems is creaking.

Okay, exhale. Let’s talk about the part of culture that’s really sport, but also a little bit theater. Darts — once the domain of middle-aged men with pints — has a prodigy. Luke Littler was flinging magnetic darts in diapers; by 18, he’d stacked an all-time rookie season, won the Premier League, and turned arenas into fancy-dress carnivals. The “Luke Littler effect” is real: youth leagues with waitlists, sold-out nights in Berlin and Newcastle, and a fan base chanting for three-dart 180s like it’s a Champions League final. He throws like gravity is optional, shrugs like nothing phases him, and makes a pub game look like Formula 1. If he keeps this up, darts won’t be a British niche; it’ll be a global circuit with a teenager at the center. 

And if your week needs a small, sharp coda: the rituals of daily life are changing under pressure, too. In LA, “home” now comes with air sampling and insurance appeals. In Australia, childhood might come with a log-off by law. In France, a centuries-old knit sits boxed because a tariff might jump tomorrow. In New York, a decade-old college checkbox lands in a mayoral race. In Israel and Iran, weapons scientists and speechwriters tally different kinds of costs; security one way, standing another. It’s all connected, all at once.

That’s the week: sieges and signaling, smoke and standards, stripes and supply chains, plus a teen who throws darts like a metronome with swagger. This is This Week, Basically. I’m Robyn Davies. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time.