Nuclear Inspectors

At long last: “Yesterday was a very, very good day,” Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters from Switzerland, where he met with an Iranian delegation as well as mediators from Pakistan and Qatar to hammer out a Middle East peace deal. “We made a lot of good progress. We did exactly what we wanted to do.”

Vance noted “that Iran had promised to readmit nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, though Iran did not immediately confirm that,” reports The New York Times. 

“Earlier, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said sanctions on his country’s oil were waived, some of its frozen assets released, and that a ‘reconstruction and development plan’ was launched,” reports CNN. The fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, remains a “work in progress” according to Vance.

This is a relief, given that the deal looked like it was all falling apart as recently as this past Friday, when Iran’s military claimed it was responding to continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.

“There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period,” responded President Donald Trump, “and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed, for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.” (Just a week ago, Trump had told The New York Times that the Strait of Hormuz must be “permanently toll-free.”)

It’s a relief that progress seems to be happening, despite what looked like calamity on Friday and Saturday. More on this in the coming days.

Scenes from New York: Adriano Espaillat, who has served as the U.S. representative for New York’s 13th congressional district since 2017, is now facing an unexpected challenge from 32-year-old Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running to his left.

Avila Chevalier, like Espaillat, is Dominican, but she moved to New York City from Florida to attend college at Columbia and has been deemed a “transplant” by her opponent. “I didn’t have to be born here to belong to this fight, because this community chose me, and I am choosing it back,” she said at a National Action Network rally this past weekend at the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem. “I don’t want power over you. I never have. I want power with you, power that lifts every family in Harlem, in Washington Heights, in Kingsbridge, power that keeps ICE out of our churches, power that makes rent something you can actually afford.”

“We need to be careful of fair weather friends that come around and say that the rent is too high,” responded Espaillat. “But they’re the ones that are driving up the rent,” he added. “They are the gentrifiers!”

This is the most brain-dead conversation about gentrification and rent that I can imagine. Rent is obscenely high in New York City because 40 percent of the city’s rentals are rent-stabilized (and about 26 percent of the overall housing stock); rents elsewhere are driven up because of the many rents that are kept artificially low, since landlords must recoup their costs somewhere. (Ditto for those new developments that have a certain number of units set aside to be below-market-rate “affordable housing.” The reason your 2 bedroom, 2 bath is going for $8,326 is because 10 percent of the units in the building are designated “affordable.”)

Rents are also high because lots of people want to live in this city—crazy, I know, to those of you who would sooner chop off your left arm with a rusty ax. That’s not something that can be fixed by policy, really, though I suppose politicians can make it more miserable and thus drive some folks out. (It’ll just be the most productive and rational people who leave.) More building, and building higher, could also help. (We’re seeing a big rezoning-and-building initiative in Gowanus, Brooklyn, right now, which I’ve covered a bit in this newsletter.)

Anyway, DAC is a bit of a clown. In 2020, she reposted a tweet calling to “seize all properties from landlords” and to “nationalize the hospitals” as well as “pharma.” The rest of her tweets from back then—which she tries to pass off as so long ago, calling it “half a decade” which, to be clear, is just five years—show that she’s fond of Marxism, not so fond of Israel, and a big supporter of “defund the police” initiatives. (“We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements,” she wrote at one point.) She’s a convert to Islam and a believer that “ALL PIGS EVERYWHERE ARE HARAM” (referring to cops).

QUICK HITS

• Keir Starmer will step down as the U.K.’s prime minister. He apparently “accepted his position was untenable after it was made clear he no longer retained the support of the cabinet or wider parliamentary party,” reports Bloomberg. “Andy Burnham is seen as almost certain to be the next occupant of No. 10, with betting markets giving him a 95% chance of becoming prime minister by year-end.”
• “Cuba’s communist government will open key economic sectors such as banking and energy to private capital and foreign companies and begin privatizing state companies through share sales, the island’s prime minister told the National Assembly Thursday. The measures are among the most consequential in a market-reform package that Cuban leaders have rushed to approve in an effort to remain in power amid a severe humanitarian crisis, daily protests and significant pressure from the Trump administration,” reports the Miami Herald. 
• Ben McAdams is vying for a U.S. House seat, out of Utah, running as a more moderate Democrat and a squish on abortion.
• Interesting:

A month ago, I published a 13,000-word essay on IVF and egg freezing. The core argument is that the American fertility funnel pushes women toward far higher drug doses than the rest of the world, defaulting to the most aggressive protocol for nearly every woman — usually without… pic.twitter.com/uJ4Ttdq5eQ

— Riva (@rivatez) June 21, 2026

• The kids will be all right:

My eight-year-old just started asking me about the guillotine in detail. What is it? Who used it? Was it exported out of France? Eventually, I asked him where he’d learned that the guillotine even existed.

“Tom and Jerry.”

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 21, 2026