As word spread on Saturday that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been killed in his underground Beirut bunker by an Israeli air strike, people began quietly reckoning with the possibility that Lebanon’s political architecture might be about to shift for the first time in more than three decades. And that, in turn, raised the prospect that locked doors might soon open across the Middle East.

Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, the premiere of the comedy juggernaut’s 50th season, started with a battle of vibes. The lengthy cold open ping-ponged between campaign rallies for the two main presidential candidates, turning first to Vice President Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph). “Well, well, well.

Illustrations by Miki Lowe
Eavan Boland is known as a poet of history, but she might’ve taken issue with that label. As she told The Believer in 2014, she was interested not in history but in the past. Boland—who died in 2020 at age 75—saw the former as the official narrative, telling the kind of stories that showed up not only in school textbooks in her native Ireland but also in the poetry of her contemporaries. These writings didn’t seem to reflect the private lives of ordinary people.

This article was originally published by Quanta Magazine.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs—and through them, many modern applications of artificial intelligence.
Every LLM has its own answer. In Meta’s open-source Llama 3 model, words are split into tokens represented by 4,096 numbers; for one version of GPT-3, it’s 12,288.

As a teenager, I took boxing lessons. What I learned from that experience—and I commend a bit of pugilistic training to all budding civilian strategists—is that you can take a punch and keep on going. But if your opponent can fire off a combination that connects—jab, jab, jab, cross, hook—you begin staggering, and then the blows will keep raining down until the coach calls an end to the round, or you throw in the towel.
That is what the Israelis have done to Hezbollah over the past two months.

In the summer of 2006, I participated in the evacuation of American citizens from Lebanon. Israel had invaded after Hezbollah abducted two of its soldiers in a cross-border raid. I was a Marine Corps officer, and our platoon was embarked on the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious ship, for a routine deployment in the Mediterranean. My unit, the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment—“1/8,” for short—had history in Lebanon.

At the center of current conflicts in the Middle East is a long-running staring contest between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And Netanyahu seems to have calculated that, even if Israel moves ferociously against Khamenei’s so-called Axis of Resistance—the region-wide network of militias arrayed against Israeli and Western interests—Khamenei won’t do much in response.

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Kamala Harris visited the southern border in Arizona this week as immigration takes center stage in the election. Though some recent polls show Harris neck and neck with Donald Trump in key swing states, she trails him on the issue of immigration among certain voters.

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.
Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.