No matter how much has changed over the past decade, one thing remains true: Saturday Night Live never brings in Dave Chappelle for a filler episode. The comedian has now hosted the show four times in just more than eight years, each stint coming on the heels of a pivotal election. Last night, in the SNL installment preceding President-Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, Chappelle opened his monologue by detailing his attempts to turn down the daunting gig this time around.

It was like a party at the end of the world. Before TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, pulled the plug on the app last night—getting ahead of the official ban in the United States, which took effect today—the app’s most devoted users were going overboard. I watched someone with their hand up a Kermit puppet having (or maybe just performing) an emotional breakdown over the app’s impending demise, the frog’s mouth gaping toward the ceiling on livestream.

When my family returned to our home in Santa Monica last Sunday night, we breathed a sigh of relief. Our house was fine, and the air quality was in the “good” category. Schools would reopen the next day. But as we unpacked, I noticed what looked like salt-and-pepper snow delicately dancing over the street. Ash from the Palisades Fire, burning just five miles north of us, was descending all around, coating the car we had left behind.

We are a vow to an empty field, the field’s
dropseed dropping, the field hurt from sun,
the millstream stitching the evenings one
to the next, the wheel turning with it
to open every seam. Steady. This mill
is empty, its windows long since sealed
for the last time, hands ash that wrapped
around these boards. I have been counting
the birds left in the rafters, the light
sorting through the roof, and the stones in the river
keep stumbling past my reach. This song of fragments
opens, falters.

Hamas and Israel each abandoned long-standing demands in order to secure the cease-fire that takes effect today. Both parties were responding to internal and external pressures when Israel agreed to pull its forces back from almost all of Gaza, and Hamas accepted a temporary cessation of hostilities, but not the end to war it had sought.
In Israel’s case, one source of external pressure was President-Elect Donald Trump, who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu to accept conditions he’d long rejected.