• ELI5 stands for “Explain Like I’m 5,

• type ELI5: followed by the topic you want to know about.
• TLDR is fairly common internet slang, so ChatGPT's understanding of the idea of “too long; didn’t read”

• Just type TLDR and then paste in whatever long text you want condensed. You get an immediate summary without any need to explain what you want in further detail.

• I've used it for recipe blogs that insist on opening with a memoir, for parsing subscription cancellation policies, and even for very long group texts that I didn't get to before facing an hour of reading to catch up on.

• Paste in your text after writing "Humanize:" in the prompt, or just explain what you're looking for. Clunky messages that sound fake-friendly or just want a text sound less passive-aggressive and more genuinely clear. It's useful.
• "Teach me this using the Feynman Technique," followed by the topic.

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• A growing number of elected Republicans, conservative pundits, and other longtime Donald Trump supporters are getting louder in their criticisms of the president’s war in Iran. But if you think that means they’re all turning on the commander in chief, you’ve underestimated the pro-Trump pretzels into which many on the right are willing to contort themselves.

    

• Rather than holding Trump accountable for his war of choice, several Republican critics are finding ways to place the bulk of the blame elsewhere. Some fault Israel for goading him into attacking the Islamic republic. Others accuse warmongering advisers of ensorcelling the president with talk of an easy victory. For conservatives, the impulse to lay the war at the feet of anyone but Trump has advantages. For one thing, it allows them to demonstrate their fealty to the president in a right-wing media ecosystem that’s fast becoming its own kind of battleground. But it’s also a convenient way to exculpate a famously thin-skinned commander in chief who, even in his politically weakened state, remains the GOP’s lodestar. And as a symptom of many Republicans’ reticence to speak plainly to and about Trump, it’s also an object lesson in how the U.S. ended up in exactly the kind of Middle Eastern conflict the president pledged to avoid.

    

   

   

    
• and ignores that other regional leaders, including Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were also reportedly egging on a U.S. attack. For
• Yet Kent, who also credited Trump for having “understood better than any modern president how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars” during his first term, doesn’t address how such a savvy operator let himself get fooled.

• And then there are the ones blaming the administration without blaming Trump. Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, left a closed-door briefing with Pentagon officials last week, incensed over what he described as their evasiveness about the war’s goals and scope. “The administration needs to be more forthcoming when they send folks over here,” he vented to reporters. But Rogers also took pains to make it clear that none of his frustrations should be taken as an attack on the president’s vision. As he emphasized in a text message to NBC News, his “criticism has NOTHING to do with Operation Epic Fury,” adding, “I fully support what the administration is doing in Iran.” Talk about splitting hairs.

      

   

     

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• For many of his supporters, the president cannot fail; he can only be failed.

      

   

     

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• If the Iran war drags on, Republican critics who have refrained from faulting Trump may find that evasion harder to sustain. But for now, the hunt continues for someone else—anyone else—to blame. “As this thing goes south, we need to know exactly who talked him into it and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea,” the “MAGA-adjacent” podcast host Megyn Kelly said on Friday. “Was the president fully briefed about the risks of all of this from the beginning?” Laura Ingraham, one of Trump’s staunchest on-air defenders, wondered aloud on her Fox show on Monday. As Kelly put it, “Now that it’s not only going poorly, but the president’s poll numbers are in a precipitous free fall, we’d love to see some accountability.” Just not for the president.

    

     

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• From region to region in the World the dietary habits are totally diverse. Right in India there is the Mushar community, eating rats, out of the compulsion of poverty. In North Eastern States the prevalence of Beef eating is much more than in many other states of India. As the beef was made a political issue and lynching of Muslims and Dalits became common by Hindu nationalists, we heard the Kerala BJP’s N. Shriprakasham stating that if he is elected, he will ensure the supply of better-quality beef. In the teaser of film ‘Kerala Story 2’, we see the Muslim family forcibly feeding beef to the Hindu girl who has married a Muslim. What a parody. To dissuade Hindu girls from marrying a Muslim man, this is shown to discourage girls from making their choice in marriage. The fact is beef is very common in Kerala as a food item.

      

• As Human history shows us that we have seen all types of dietary practices in our history. Currently the trend is of Veganism. This is on the grounds that milk given by animals is for their calves and not for humans. This is a welcome moral stand. Practically speaking, vegetarianism is better for environmental protection. That apart, the present practices of people have to be respected. My friend and mentor Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer used to tell me that Gandhiji was very open about offering non vegetarian food to his guests without much hesitation. When requested that he should ensure a ban on cow slaughter he said that the country belongs to people of diverse food practices so it will be unfair to them to resort to such a law.

      

• Most dangerous distortion is to deny the consumption of meat in ancient times and the propaganda that Muslims are violent due to their dietary habits.

      

   

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• Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

   

• Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.

   

   

• Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.

   

• Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.

   

• Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.

   

• One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.

   
• but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship. By 2011, our war had slaughtered some one million Iraqis, orphaned at least a million children, and displaced four million people within or outside Iraq, according to body counts by The Lancet medical journal, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others. In short, one of every five Iraqis was forced from his or her home: a chilling foreshadowing of what we have since seen in Gaza, and that we are now beginning to see in Iran and Lebanon

• The U.S. not only killed and displaced all those people; it bankrupted Iraq with sanctions, poisoned it with depleted uranium, destroyed its infrastructure and middle class, and dismantled its achievements. Before we invaded, Iraq had the best medical system in the Middle East, and women there had more rights than in any Muslim country other than Turkey, making up 50% of students and 40% of the workforce. By the time we left, all of that, including women’s rights, had been undone.

   

• Today, women’s rights in Iraq have eroded even further and women are now relegated to second-class citizenship. Just this March 2nd, the most prominent women’s rights advocate in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, was shot to death by men driving by on motorcycles. Nobody has claimed responsibility for her assassination, nor has anybody yet been arrested — and that was just one of many political assassinations there since our war.

   

• Seeking relief from such a myopic view of war, I set out to meet Iraqis who had lived through the war themselves. I wanted to hear the other side, the side we were not telling.  So, when I found out that several hundred Iraqis had been resettled in Albany, New York, on the special visas (called SIVs) reserved for those who had worked for two years or more as interpreters for the U.S. military or government officials, I decided to seek them out. That is how I came to meet several women I will never forget, among them a young poet named Nour, and a mother of three named Hala. (I’m withholding their last names for their safety.)

   

• Nour told me she had been imprisoned and tortured in the city of Abu Ghraib at the age of 16 for writing a poem that Saddam Hussein didn’t like. After her release, she taught herself English and later became a translator for a freelance American journalist. In 2005, she and the journalist were kidnapped in the city of Basra and shot. The journalist was killed, but thanks to several surgeries, Nour survived and came to the U.S. with the help of his widow.

   

• “I like school,” Mustafa told me with confidence. But Hiba said she was mostly ostracized by the other students at her Albany college. Feelings against Iraqis ran high in those days — against all Arabs, in fact — and she was spared little of it.

   

• “Some of them don’t like me because they know I’m an Arab and Muslim, and some because they think I’m Hispanic,” she said, her pretty face rueful, and with a shrug, she pushed her long hair over her shoulder. Her only friend, she added, was a young woman who had moved here from India.

   

• Today, in Donald Trump’s America, neither Nour, Hala, nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so. Indeed, the chances of any refugee finding asylum in the U.S. now are just about zero. The Trump administration has banned refugees, asylum seekers, or any immigrants from 75 countries — including Iraq.

   

• Disconcerted by such an unexpected responsibility, I took refuge in addressing Mustafa. Looking into his little face, I attempted to apologize on behalf not only of the United States, but of England, too, for destroying his country and killing his brother. And then, like an idiot, I began to cry.

   
• Hiba handed me a Kleenex, but neither she nor her mother and brother cried with me. I was mortified.
• What did I want from them, weeping like this? It wasn’t my son and brother who’d been killed. It wasn’t my life that had been torn away. It wasn’t my country that had been ruined.

• She shook her head. “No, no, my friend.” She smiled at me kindly. “We lived under Saddam. We understand that there are people. And there are leaders. And that the two are not the same.”

   

• I wonder, as we rain bombs down on the people of Iran today, if they would be able to find it in themselves to be quite so forgiving.

   

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