Although much of the world is breathing a sigh of relief that Iran and Israel appear unwilling to push their exchange of missile and drone attacks further, potentially plunging the Middle East into a wider war, the danger of another escalation has not passed. Rather, the concern has shifted to a possible Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has threatened this, and U.S. officials and others in the region fear that such a plan has been in the works for months.

This story was supposed to have a different beginning. You were supposed to hear about how, earlier this week, I attended a splashy launch party for a new AI gadget—the Rabbit R1—in New York City, and then, standing on a windy curb outside the venue, pressed a button on the device to summon an Uber home. Instead, after maybe an hour of getting it set up and fidgeting with it, the connection failed.
The R1 is a bright-orange chunk of a device, with a camera, a mic, and a small screen.

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More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

In 2015, PEN America, the organization devoted to defending free speech, chose to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at its annual gala. A few months earlier, Islamic extremists had murdered 12 people at the publication’s offices in Paris. The rationale for recognizing the magazine seemed airtight: People had been killed for expressing themselves, and PEN America’s mission is to protect people targeted for what they express.

Updated at 3:57 p.m. ET on April 26, 2024
In Las Vegas last Friday, I watched a Godzilla-sized puppy give a tongue bath to some 18,000 people. The visual—accompanied by laughter, slack jaws, and modest plumes of vaporized weed—arrived roughly three hours into a performance by Phish, the storied band, which has now been around for 40 years. At the moment in question, the band was launching into a capella scatting and mouth noising—what fans recognize as a vocal jam.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Occasionally you read a book that changes your sense of what a book can do. For me, that title was Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, which recounts the history of Belgium’s brutal colonial rule over the Congo and how an early-20th-century human-rights campaign managed to bring world attention to the atrocities taking place in the name of profit.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
In last week’s newsletter, I described artificial intelligence as data-hungry. But the technology is also quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with.