Dear President Trump:

I'm sure you were disappointed to learn on Monday that Iran's rulers have decided they're not interested in negotiating an extension of the ceasefire you granted on April 8. That ceasefire was in exchange for their promise to let commercial vessels freely transit the Strait of Hormuz – a promise they almost immediately broke.

The reason Iran's rulers gave: Israel is striking Hezbollah in Lebanon in response to hundreds of Hezbollah missile and drone attacks on communities in northern Israel. You attempted to broker another ceasefire but, hours later, Hezbollah launched another massive barrage.

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Unknown to most people alive today, Bennett Cerf was at one point one of the most famous people in America. Cerf, who co-founded the publishing firm Random House, was a columnist, best-selling author, and regular participant on CBS's What's My Line? He was also, despite his WASPy name, a Jew.

Many of the major publishing houses were founded by Jews. Besides Random House, there were also Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and Viking, among others. Cerf named his company Random House in part to avoid a Jewish-sounding name but also because he planned to publish Modern Library classics and other books "at random."

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When Israel made the historic decision late last year to recognize Somaliland, it did something few nations are willing to do: it acted on principle and strategic interest rather than diplomatic convention.

After more than three decades in which Somaliland has maintained its own institutions, elections, security forces, and governing structures – including multiple competitive presidential elections with peaceful transfers of power – Israel became the first country to acknowledge Somaliland's claim to sovereign statehood.

That decision mattered.

But recognition alone is not enough.

Now comes the harder part: turning a symbolic breakthrough into diplomatic momentum.

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President Trump's trip to China brings the economic implications of America's war against Iran into sharper focus. The fact that the Taiwan Strait generated more news than the Strait of Hormuz during the recent news cycle, is a telling indicator.

Critics keep framing this as crass resource politics: oil, opening the Strait of Hormuz waterway, and keeping gas prices down for American consumers.

Granted, we all want the price at the pump to come down, and previous administrations have cried wolf about weapons of mass destruction in the Mideast before, but the naysayers are wrong on the facts about this oil and water paradigm as I call it.

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When I arrived in Egypt as The New York Times' Cairo Bureau Chief in the early 1980's, I never imagined that I would be spending so much time in Israel.

I had barely unpacked when I found myself on a plane to Tel Aviv, not to cover a story in Israel, but the 1983 suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, a terrorist attack that had killed 241 unsuspecting U.S. servicemen as they slept in their barracks.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that peace between Israel and Lebanon is "imminently achievable"—if Beirut can finally confront Hezbollah. But even as Washington presses the two governments toward unprecedented security understandings, Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade fire in southern Lebanon.

The ceasefire declared by President Donald Trump on April 16, and then extended on April 23, now hangs in the balance.

For the governments of Israel and Lebanon, the uptick in violence comes at a delicate time. The ambassadors from both nations have met twice now in Washington in a bid to reach new security understandings—but Hezbollah remains powerful enough to stymie these efforts.

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A century ago, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois published The Gift of Black Folk, a book that was commissioned by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, as part of a series intended to help Americans appreciate the contributions of minority groups.

DuBois was highly educated and an avid reader of great texts from Plato to Frederick Douglass. The irony of the present moment is that if DuBois were currently a student in a core philosophy class at Texas A&M University, he would be assigned only a redacted version of Plato's great work, The Republic.

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Imagine your physician walks into the exam room, recommends a prescription medication, and casually mentions she's being paid by the company that makes the drug to say so. You'd probably have questions.

You might even find a new doctor.

Now imagine that same scenario playing out on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube — except the advice is coming from a celebrity "influencer" who's very familiar to you, who has an emotional backstory, and a financial arrangement buried somewhere in a sea of hashtags. Millions of people encounter exactly this situation every day, and most of them have no idea it's happening.

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ANYONE WHO spends time with me knows me knows how much I despise litter. For as long as I can remember, I have fumed at the sight of trash on sidewalks, beer cans in the gutter, or garbage flung from passing cars. I often pick up litter when I'm walking, and when my kids were young I made them pick it up, too.

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