On October 14, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.7 percent in the 12 months through September, while the index excluding food and energy, the core rate, rose 2.6 percent after 2.4 percent through August. Shelter, the largest single block in both measures, rose 3.2 percent over the same 12 months. For anyone reading the two rates side by side, that one component pushes them in opposite directions: it lifts core from 2.0 percent to 2.6 and holds the all-items rate at 3.7 instead of 4.0, so the claim that housing is pushing inflation up is true of one number and false of the other. The figures come from the BLS Consumer Price Index news release for September 2026 and its first three tables. This post follows the shelter line through them: what the index counts as shelter, why September's monthly shelter increase of 0.4 percent is not a rent number, and how much of each 12-month rate shelter accounts for once the rounding comes off. T...
On October 12, 2026, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed DOE Order No. 202-26-50 , a Federal Power Act Section 202(c) emergency order for PJM Interconnection, the grid operator whose region the order describes as all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. From October 13 through October 16, it let PJM dispatch listed power plants that might exceed their environmental permit limits, and call on backup generators as a last resort before, or during, an Energy Emergency Alert 3. For a reader in one of those 13 states, the count is a map of where PJM operates, not of where the grid was short: PJM's own filing found the most acute strain in three zones, and the order ties the 61,591 MW of anticipated generation outages to planned outages in the autumn outage season. What the Count of 13 States Measures The count comes from footnote 3 of the order, not from its findings. The footnote's sentence reads: “The PJM Region includes all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, India...