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Good morning,

You know you're burning the candle at both ends when you're looking forward to major surgery so you can get a few days off from your work and familial responsibilities. It's like when you're waiting to cross the street and you feel that fleeting urge to walk in front of traffic and get lightly hit by a car as an excuse to take a little break from the day-to-day, right? Just me? OK then.

This time tomorrow I'll be getting these little gremlins removed from my kidney and, God willing, that will be the end of that. I’m feeling pretty good all things considered. More annoyed I have to fast today. I’m already hungry. Anyway, I've been head down this week taping some shows for when I'm out. We've got a solid slate coming up: Tomorrow, we'll publish my conversation with Christopher Hale of Letters From Leo about what everyone's missing in their coverage of the pope's brilliant AI encyclical. Then on Monday, we've got an interview with Corbin Trent, AOC's former comms guy, batting around his ideas for a Democratic party that builds again. And on Wednesday we'll drop an episode I just wrapped with my friend and unofficial 1600 Roving European Correspondent Dylan Ratigan, who beamed in from Barcelona to give us his take on the state of the economy and the exhausting debate on the left over whether "billionaires should exist." All three of these were fun, so I hope you guys will watch/listen in my absence.

I'm trying to keep the good vibes going into tomorrow, so rather than talk about any of the various ways in which the country appears to be circling the drain, let's highlight a couple positive stories in the news that haven't gotten a lot of coverage. The thing you gotta understand about the news media is that our job is to stoke conflict, antagonism, hostility and partisanship. That's what "sells papers" — or in this day and age — stops you from scrolling. It's also easy, because there's a ton of conflict and antagonism to go around, and journalists are by definition lazy. But this business strategy also fails to highlight things that are going right... pieces of bipartisan agreement, Ds and Rs working together, Trump being on the right side of an issue, et al. 

Take Congress. Everybody correctly understands that our legislative branch now functions mostly as a national collective of social-media influencers. But in between TikToks they do actually work on legislation, too. Some of it even advances, or actually passes! Last week, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the House 396–13. You probably didn't hear about that rather remarkable show of bipartisanship, coming in such a divisive moment. The bill seeks to boost the country's housing supply in a myriad of ways, including provisions that relax limits on manufactured or modular home construction, programs to turn abandoned buildings into housing, increasing FHA multifamily loan limits and plenty of other stuff around zoning and land-use policies. The House also stripped out a controversial provision known as build-to-rent, which the Senate version of the bill included and would have forced the sale of single-family rental homes after 7 years. Instead, the House version restricts the acquisition of housing by investors who already own more than 350 single-family homes. 

You can quibble with any of this — I don't think institutional investor ownership of homes is as big a deal as others make it out to be — but the point is that a Republican Congress is going against the desires of Wall Street and saying that the question who buys up our housing stock is a legitimate matter of public policy legislators can and should deal with, free marketeers be damned. That a divided House passed a major piece of housing affordability legislation by a margin that will almost ensure the Senate has to pass it and send it to Trump's desk for signature is a big deal; evidence of our government actually working together on a major problem affecting the #1 issue in the country (affordability). Bravo!

Meanwhile, Trump is also urging Republicans to back the Railway Safety Act, a bill written in response to the 2023 catastrophic train derailment that spewed vinyl chloride all over the residents of East Palestine, Ohio and has been in limbo ever since. The RSA would tighten regulations around freight trains carrying hazardous materials and require two-person crews, among other provisions meant to deal with the notoriously lax safety standards on our freight railroads (which derail at 10x the rate of British freight trains). The rail industry, which has returned some $200B to shareholders in the form of buybacks over the last decade while simultaneously reducing staff by the thousands, is against the RSA, naturally. But a Republican-controlled Congress is about to buck a powerful industry lobby to force more regulation. When was the last time you heard of that happening?

The takeaway here is just that. The GOP of yesteryear is dead and gone. In many ways, what has replaced it is worse: an increasingly extremist personality cult that answers to the whims of one man. But look at it a different way. Republicans are no longer in thrall to the deregulatory, free market demands of their longtime allies in the Chamber of Commerce or industry lobbyists. They are willing to impose safety regulations on an industry over that industry's objections. They are willing to go against Wall Street's creeping influence over the housing sector (a small part of our housing problem, but symbolic nonetheless). That all strikes me as something to cheer.

OK, folks. I'm signing off. Jesus will take you through next week, and hopefully I'll be back in action a week from Monday. I'll send a proof-of-life video to our Subtext group as soon as I am able. Good night and good luck!

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Carlo Versano is Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture. He has in-depth knowledge and experience covering a range of topics and stories over a 20-year career in the news business. Carlo joined Newsweek in 2024 after a stint at The Messenger. Before that, he was an Emmy-winning producer at NBC News. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the New School. You can get in touch with Carlo by emailing [email protected].

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Immigration enforcement at World Cup venues could have a "chilling effect" on fan attendance at the global soccer tournament, a former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director told Newsweek.

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I watched a documentary about the 1994 U.S. World Cup team last night. Two weeks out from the tournament, it felt like the right time to remember what that team meant.

Americans love underdog stories. 1994 was the perfect one. A group of players nobody believed in, a foreign coach who barely spoke English, a country with no business competing at this level. And they beat one of the favorites. One of the biggest upsets in World Cup history.

But it felt like a different America back then. The day they played their opening match, O.J. Simpson was fleeing in his Bronco. The country was divided and distracted. Yet somehow this team pulled people together around the flag, around something to be proud of.

I come from a soccer-crazy country, and I've watched how differently Americans engage with the sport. It's not that soccer is soft. It's that there are too many other things competing for attention here. But when Americans do invest in something, they invest completely.

I wonder what happens this year if the U.S. has a good tournament. What if they make a run? What if they're invited to the White House? The country has changed since 1994. Back then, it was just about pride. Now it's about positions on everything else. I wonder if this team can pull people together the way they did back then, or if we're too divided for that anymore.

“As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

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Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].