It feels like there’s no end in sight for the war in Iran, and in today’s newsletter we’ll talk about how that’s showing up in the stock market and energy prices. You know what isn’t expensive these days? The drones Iran uses in strikes. We’ll explain. Also, the FBI is buying your phone data, the metaverse is virtually dead, and March is mad for a whole other reason. But first my colleague Elizabeth Trovall gives us the view of the war from Texas farms and oil fields. 
— Carrie Barber , newsletter editor

In an open field, farmer Casey Smith surveys his newly planted rice crop in Brazoria County, south of Houston.

“This is the early stage. We're in the first two weeks of this crop. It'll get about waist-tall by the time we harvest,” he said.

The rice plants are about three inches high. They look like blades of grass, peeking through the dirt and are placed in tidy rows.

“My son actually planted this field. My 12-year-old,” he said.

Once this field dries out, Smith will need to add more fertilizer to his crop. But when he got a quote for the Urea fertilizer he uses, the price per ton had jumped about 25% since the war in the Middle East started less than three weeks ago.

“That's definitely gone up and so I think that's about $30, $40 an acre when you start applying it to the field,” he said. “It didn't take very long to add up some expenses.”

Considering higher diesel prices, which have gone up by $1.50 or so, he's looking at tens of thousands of dollars in additional expenses.

“Diesel … it's a big expense. My farm here, we're typically burning, you know, 20 to 25,000 gallons of fuel a year,” he said.

Smith loves rice farming, but it’s a brutal business. And now, because of the war, which has constrained the flow of global oil, natural gas and other petroleum products like fertilizer, Smith said he worries what this means for his operating costs.

“This crop will not make enough yield to offset any of those expenses. It's just going to take off our bottom line, which there is no bottom line. We're paper thin,” he said.

Five hundred miles northwest of Brazoria County is the engine of U.S. oil production: the Permian Basin in West Texas. You might think as prices climb, so will production.

The struggling U.S. Postal Service lost $9 billion last fiscal year. Its obligation to deliver mail six days a week is expensive, but the service has limited ability to raise prices even as letter volume has tanked. Losing business from Amazon is another blow.

Now USPS and Congress are looking at ways to close the revenue gap, including reducing delivery days, increasing stamp prices and closing rural offices. It begs the question: Should we expect the Postal Service to make money?

March temperatures have been so high this year, you’d think we skipped spring altogether. Extreme heat baked California this week, breaking records and triggering heat warnings in the southern part of the state. Yesterday, the desert community of North Shore reached 108 degrees, tying a 1954 record in Rio Grand City, Texas, for the highest March temperature recorded in the U.S. It’s not just the Southwest; cities across the country are feeling the heat.  See how your city compares on The Pudding’s heat-mapping project.