The mailbox, the horror movie, and the one-way door

SCOTUS preserved mail access to mifepristone, but Thomas's dissent points towards a path to ending it. The tradwife argument got an Anne Hathaway adaptation and a peer-reviewed paper. The Musk v. Altman trial closed with Microsoft's CEO calling the OpenAI deal "a one-way door." Nvidia got cleared to sell its H200 chip to ten Chinese firms with a 25% federal cut attached.

Word of the week: equanimity.

Maddy said it in this week's Euphoria, sitting across from Rue in a diner, explaining "everything is as it should be." Rue does not exactly buy it. Neither should we. But the word is useful anyway.

Equanimity can be a healthy reading posture. The kind of steadiness it takes to absorb what everyone else skips, enough calm not to look away from reality.

This week, the Supreme Court preserved mail access to mifepristone. In dissent, Clarence Thomas pointed to the legal road map for ending it later. The tradwife movement got an Anne Hathaway adaptation and a peer-reviewed paper. The OpenAI trial turned private AI-industry fears into public evidence. Nvidia's China chip approval came with a hidden federal cut.

The pattern this week is power moving through mechanisms most people do not read closely enough: dissents, statutes, contracts, board memos, export rules, and cultural products that look softer than they are.

So yes. Equanimity. The kind where you keep your eyes and ears open and don't let the noise throw you off track.

The abortion-pill fight moved to the mailbox

The Supreme Court did not decide the merits of the mifepristone case yesterday. It preserved the status quo while the case continues.

That means, for now, patients can still access mifepristone by telehealth and mail under the FDA's current rules. Most women in your group chat felt real relief yesterday. The dissent is where the next move is announced.

Clarence Thomas wrote that the executive branch did not need any of this. He invoked the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law that prohibits using the mail to ship certain abortion-related materials. He stated that mailing mifepristone for abortion use is "a criminal offense."

The Comstock Act has been treated as a dead letter for decades. The Justice Department has not enforced its abortion provision in the modern era. The statute, however, has never been repealed. Thomas used it to tell a future attorney general which existing federal law to enforce in order to restrict mail-order mifepristone nationally, without Congress, without a new Supreme Court ruling, and without overturning anything new.

Medication abortion accounts for roughly two-thirds of U.S. abortions. The regimen usually involves two drugs: mifepristone first, then misoprostol. The FDA's current rules allow a patient to consult a clinician by telehealth, receive a prescription, and have the pills mailed by a certified pharmacy. That access is what the Louisiana lawsuit, and Thomas's dissent, are aimed at.

The legal fight is being described as a fight over mail delivery, telehealth regulation, FDA authority, and pharmacy compliance. It is all of those things. The political objective underneath is simpler: medication abortion lets abortion access cross state lines after Dobbs. A pill mailed from California can reach a patient in Texas. Comstock is the tool for trying to stop that.

The Comstock Act was passed in 1873 as part of a federal moral-purity campaign led by Anthony Comstock, who used postal authority to seize contraceptives, books, and materials he considered obscene. The law was designed around a particular view of what the public mail could carry and what the federal government should be allowed to police.

The broader environment is also shifting. Pew reported this week that 37% of U.S. adults now say religion is gaining influence in American life, the highest share in Pew's polling on the question since 2002. Most Americans still say churches should stay out of politics, but more people are noticing that religion is playing a larger role in public life.

The danger is what happens when religious beliefs become a source of legal authority, social legitimacy, and political power aimed at women's autonomy or any other group for that matter.

The tradwife argument finally got its horror movie

Tradwives are the same argument in a trendier voice.

Anne Hathaway is set to star in Yesteryear, the adaptation of Caro Claire Burke's debut novel about a tradwife influencer with five million followers who wakes up in 1855 inside the actual version of the life she has been selling. The film has already generated backlash before production has started. Some of the backlash comes from people who find the premise patronizing. Some comes from people who find the genre cynical. Some comes from people who think the conversation is already stale.

The piece worth reading underneath the film coverage is Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sara Reinis's paper, "The Rage of Tradwives," published in Feminist Theory. Banet-Weiser is the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn. Reinis is a doctoral student there. They analyzed 50 tradwife accounts on Instagram and TikTok and made the argument that surface-level aesthetic critique misses the real thing happening.

Their argument, briefly: tradwives and feminists are responding to the same broken system.

Both are reacting to capitalist hustle culture, the devaluation of reproductive labor, and the collapse of care infrastructure. Both are, in the paper's framing, expressions of rage. The tradwife answer is a return to individual domestic submission inside a heterosexual Christian household. The feminist answer is collective political struggle.

Tradwives took a real material complaint and turned it into a clear product. They have aesthetic, narrative, religion, ritual, husband, garden, sourdough and some of them are monetizing it. The product is legible to a young woman exhausted by being told she should optimize her career, her dating life, her finances, her body, her fertility, her groceries, etc. 

And sure, the complaint at the bottom of tradwife content is real. Reproductive labor is undervalued. The care economy is broken. The struggle for power is exhausting.

The substance of what specific tradwives are claiming is sharper than the discourse around them. Estee Williams, a tradwife with around 200,000 TikTok followers in Richmond, Virginia, told Dr. Phil on camera: "I submit and I serve my husband. This is biblical." She captions her videos with Ephesians 5:22-25. Hannah Neeleman, the former Juilliard-trained ballerina behind Ballerina Farm (more than nine million Instagram followers, eight children with a ninth on the way, married to a JetBlue heir), publicly rejects the tradwife label but operates as the genre's most photographed example. The 2024 Times of London profile reported that her husband and children "corrected, interrupted or answered for" her during the interview, and that her husband, on the record, described his wife's exhaustion: she sometimes "becomes so sick with exhaustion that she can't get out of bed for a week." Nara Smith, eleven million TikTok followers, makes elaborate meals from scratch in formal dress while distancing herself from "hardcore Mormon" framing and continuing to produce the content the algorithm rewards.

Researchers and journalists have linked tradwife content to broader Christian nationalist messaging. Some accounts tie large families explicitly to the survival of "Western values." The further-right corner ties them to Great Replacement Theory. 

Their answer is extremely regressive. The strength of their offer is that it is legible. The strength of the feminist critique is that it is correct. The reader has to live in the gap between those two things for a while longer.

That is why Yesteryear is interesting even before it becomes a good or bad movie. The premise works because the tradwife internet has always been selling fantasy under the language of return. Return to home. Return to femininity. Return to God. Return to nature. Return to a time when the demands supposedly made more sense.

The greatest horror is that the time being romanticized was honest about who had power, in a way the fantasy around it refuses to be.

The OpenAI trial stripped away the nonprofit halo

Closing arguments in Musk v. Altman wrapped Thursday. The advisory jury in Oakland begins deliberations Monday. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers's decision will come later.

Whatever the jury and the judge decide, the trial has already done something useful: it put private AI-industry fears into the public record.

Three things Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said under oath are now worth reading together.

The first: Nadella described Microsoft's investment in OpenAI as "a one-way door." Microsoft could not build two supercomputers, one for itself and one for OpenAI, and so it had to choose. It chose OpenAI and accepted the opportunity cost of diverting scarce compute away from its own AI teams.

The second: Nadella testified that Microsoft was outsourcing a significant amount of core IP development and taking a massive dependency on OpenAI. That sentence matters. The largest publicly listed software company in the world acknowledged that a core piece of the technology its market capitalization now rests on is owned and developed by someone else.

The third: in an April 2022 internal email introduced at trial, Nadella worried that Microsoft should not become "the next IBM" while OpenAI became "the next Microsoft."

That was before ChatGPT shipped.

The three together describe a relationship that the buyer already understood could invert. Three years later, Microsoft distributes OpenAI's models, pays OpenAI a revenue share, and still relies on OpenAI as the center of its AI strategy. The CEO who worried that Microsoft could become IBM took the deal anyway because there was no better one.

That is what the Musk lawsuit, regardless of its legal merits, has exposed.

Musk's argument is that OpenAI's nonprofit status created a "halo effect" that attracted capital, talent, and public permission a normal for-profit company could not have obtained. OpenAI's counter is that its evolution was lawful, disclosed, and necessary to raise the money required to build frontier AI.

Both can be true. Both can also be beside the point.

Multiple former insiders testified about concerns over Sam Altman's honesty and governance. Ilya Sutskever's memo from the 2023 board-firing period, introduced into evidence, used the phrase "consistent pattern of lying." Under cross-examination, Altman did not give a clean yes when asked whether he was completely trustworthy and did not mislead people in business.

The AI industry spent years selling the public on trust language: safety, alignment, public benefit, nonprofit mission, and responsible deployment. Then the most important company in the category became a for-profit-adjacent giant with a trillion-dollar ambition, a strategic dependency on Microsoft, and a federal trial in which its own former chief scientist's memo became evidence against its CEO's credibility.

Nvidia's China chip deal has a hidden 25%

Yesterday, the Commerce Department cleared Nvidia's H200, the company's second-most-powerful AI chip, for sale to roughly ten Chinese firms, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com. Distributors Lenovo and Foxconn were among the approvals.

Not a single chip has shipped.

The mechanism is the story. The Trump administration has attached a 25% federal fee to H200 sales to China. The chips are subject to strict conditions, including routing through U.S. territory. Beijing appears to have read the arrangement as a dependency trap.

China has told some domestic firms to pull back from H200 purchases as it tries to reduce reliance on foreign chips and build its own AI infrastructure. Nvidia wants access to the Chinese market. Washington wants control and a cut. Beijing wants the chips, but not the dependency.

For readers who hold Nvidia directly, or through an index fund, the 25% line matters. It did not exist three months ago and is now part of whatever China revenue the company can book. Approval on paper is one thing; revenue in the model is another. If the deals do not ship, the second-half China upside Wall Street has been pricing in gets smaller. If the deals do ship, the federal government takes a quarter off the top.

A 25% revenue cut on advanced chip exports is the government inserting itself directly into the economics of the AI chip trade. The structure has no clear precedent, no Congressional authorization, and no WTO review.

Onward…