A country runs out of interceptors. A hospital runs out of beds. A grid runs out of margin. This week Podcast Magazine asks the least glamorous question in the world: what are you keeping in reserve, and who decided you didn't need it? On the front page — seventeen dead in Kyiv and not one missile stopped; the Congo outbreak becomes the second largest ever recorded; six thousand cubic kilometres of magma hiding under Tuscany; immune cells that kill by exploding; and a buried lede about Texas, four hundred and seventy-four gigawatts, and a grid being auctioned off to a chatbot. Plus: the letter that saved Britain by refusing to help, a two-thousand-year-old Chinese grain policy that ended up in American federal law, and a podcast recommendation about a seawall that wasn't tall enough. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, corrections in the open.

How do you stop a thing once it's started? This week: the DRC Ebola outbreak passes 1,400 dead even as Uganda declares itself Ebola-free, a fragile US–Iran strike pause holds for two days, 300,000 people flee wildfires across France and Spain and nearly all make it out, and Pogačar wins a fifth Tour de France on a course the fires cut short. Plus a Bronze Age "town that stopped" in Northern Ireland, and The Number: 42. Our cover story visits three times humanity actually pulled off the stop — the Cuban Missile Crisis, smallpox, and the ozone layer — the feature is the Kuwaiti oil fires and the tank with jet engines bolted on, and the review is Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire. We close with a heartfelt goodbye to John C. Dvorak. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the commerce is fake.

How do you find the thing that's hiding in plain sight? This week: the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record in the DRC, the sharp escalation between Russia and Ukraine, and — looking up — a giant planet the Webb telescope found without ever seeing it, detected purely by its chemical fingerprint. Our cover story traces the art of detecting the invisible, from finding Neptune with a pencil to Pauli's ghost particle to dark matter. The feature is Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who spotted an unseen killer and was destroyed for being early. Plus a new Corrections desk, a new celebrity desk skewering the World Cup's halftime spectacle, and a Podcast Feature on 99% Invisible's "Structural Integrity." Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the commerce is fake.