After six weeks of fighting, Israel and Lebanon appear to be on the verge of a ceasefire. 

President Donald Trump announced the 10-day pause, which he said would help “achieve PEACE” between the countries, in a social media post on Thursday. The ceasefire is set to take effect at 5 pm ET. 

The agreement came after representatives of Israel and Lebanon met in Washington, DC, earlier this week for their first direct talks in decades, and amid the backdrop of an ongoing US-Iran ceasefire.

The most recent round of fighting began early last month, two days after the initial US and Israeli attacks on Iran, when the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah attacked a village in northern Israel.

Israel quickly retaliated, firing missiles and destroying homes in a war that has killed more than 2,000 people and displaced more than 1.2 million Lebanese. In the process, Israel has occupied about 15 percent of Lebanon’s territory; it says it expects to maintain that “buffer zone” until Hezbollah is disarmed, which could take years.

Under the terms of the ceasefire, Israeli troops would remain in southern Lebanon.

Nora Boustany, who reported from Lebanon and across the Middle East for the Washington Post for nearly three decades and now lives in Beirut, says that the greatest fear inside the country is that Israel’s occupation will continue.

“Lebanon is small,” Boustany told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “It can be swallowed in two weeks, and it’s pretty defenseless at the moment.”

Boustany, who now teaches journalism at the American University of Beirut, spoke about Lebanon’s history, her fears as Israeli tanks once again roll through southern Lebanon, and what it’s like living in Beirut right now.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, which was recorded prior to Thursday’s ceasefire news. You can listen to it, and every episode of Today, Explained, wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Of the conflicts between Lebanon and Israel that we could look at from the past decades, what concerns you most? Is it that Lebanon could slip into another civil war as it did in the mid-1970s?

Right now the biggest fear is that — like in 1978 and in 1982 when the Israelis invaded and stayed, claiming that they needed to have this buffer zone — that we’ll have part of the country under occupation. 

This is what got the Iranians involved. Hezbollah was created in 1982 on the heels of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. The [Lebanese] government was very weak then. We had the Palestine Liberation Organization and their guerillas, and driving them out took 20,000 lives at the time, mostly civilians. The country has never quite stood on its feet since then.

Iran started spending money and resources to recruit young Shiite men from those border villages and from the suburbs of Beirut to shield itself and to develop a foreign policy avenue where it could pressure the West. 

At the time, the Iran-Iraq War had started. The Iranians felt that the US, Great Britain, all these Western countries were helping arm Saddam Hussein as he was fighting Iran. Lebanon was the ideal pressure point. American hostages were kidnapped and kept for seven years by groups that were paid by Iran. My big fear is that we’re going to lapse back into that.

Hezbollah are fighting for their political life and for legitimacy, and they may come out on top. This is something the Lebanese government doesn’t want and at least two-thirds of the Lebanese population doesn’t want. It means continuous instability, continuous warfare along our southern border with Israel, and an increasing security zone, which the Israelis feel they have to establish to keep their northern settlements safe. 

Lebanon is small. It can be swallowed in two weeks, and it’s pretty defenseless at the moment.

How much is what happened in Gaza plausible in Lebanon?

The Lebanese will not give up on their country easily. But what we saw in Gaza was on both sides a kind of depravity and also a lust for land that the Israelis made no secret of. 

We were witnessing in real time — because of social media and because of Palestinian photographers and videographers in Gaza and in the West Bank — what was happening, and it’s scary. 

Hezbollah is not as entrenched in civilian areas as Hamas was. It’s not in control, but it’s certainly fighting its corner and being defiant and very bellicose. And some of the Lebanese identify with it, and that’s really scary. 

Israel’s conduct has not been encouraging either. What they did on Wednesday, [April 8], in 10 minutes was unspeakable. They killed over 350 people, a lot of them women and children.

I don’t see any difference between the Israelis and the Iranians in wanting to use the Lebanese as human shields, and that is petrifying. 

This is a country that likes to have fun. People like to go out, go to restaurants, go to the beach. There are many universities, and all that is in peril right now.

Do you think there’s a scenario in which the people stand up and say, We’re sick of this. We don’t want Hezbollah to be waging war on Israel anymore because it presents this risk that southern Lebanon could turn into the next Gaza. Do you think there’s a way out?

People stand up and say it every single day on news platforms, podcasts, interviews. 

It’s very easy to settle the issue in Lebanon: strengthening the government, helping it take care of its population that feels deprived — mainly a majority of the Shiite population, not all of them — so Iran doesn’t feel that it can come in and do what it wants. Lebanon needs help. 

And yes, the Lebanese government has been bankrupt financially and is having a very hard time standing on its feet. But we have a very honest president, [Joseph Aoun] — maybe not the most creative or assertive president, but he was the commander of the army. 

The prime minister, [Nawaf Salam], is a judge who headed the International Court of Justice. [He’s] very aware of what international law demands, yet lacking the tools or the toolbox to accomplish what a strong central government ought to be doing.

Saying history repeats itself feels like an understatement when it comes to Lebanon. How do you live with that day to day?

Everyone lives with it differently. I have cousins who live on the Christian side of Beirut. I live in the western side, which is very mixed, very blended, close to the American University [of Beirut]. I don’t go out. I leave the house twice a week to do my pilates class. I read all day. I do a lot of handholding online with my students because they are petrified, and pray that we are going to come out of this very, very dark tunnel.

There are 6 million Lebanese. They can’t all go. They can’t all leave. I happen to have a small flat in DC, but not everyone can do that. People have built rich lives here. We have a rich history here. I have a house in the country that’s been in the family for almost 470 years. I’m not going to abandon that. 

You feel that the country is no longer as central to international concerns. The French talk a good game, the Brits as well. Maybe there’ll be a little humanitarian assistance, which is great. But Lebanon needs much more than that.

Iran has already announced new interim leadership to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed this weekend, along with several other high-ranking Iranian officials in an Israeli strike.

But who will lead the country in the long term is far from certain in the opening days of what could be a protracted war.

President Donald Trump’s stated objective for the attack on Iran has shifted dramatically in recent days, from the alleged threat of an imminent nuclear attack, to the regime’s support of terrorist groups, to wanting to bring “freedom” to the people of Iran. 

Similarly, Trump’s desired outcome has been evolving on the fly, from full-scale regime change to merely replacing the leadership at the top (as the US recently did in Venezuela) to “peace throughout the Middle East, and indeed, the world,” as he wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.

Regime change is difficult to achieve through the kind of bombing campaign the US and Israel are currently pursuing, but Trump and the Pentagon aren’t ruling out sending in ground troops, even as polls show that the Iran incursion is broadly unpopular among Americans.

And Iran’s leadership has threatened “ferocious” retaliation as it fires ballistic missiles at Israel and at US military bases, civilian targets, and energy infrastructure in Gulf states.

To learn more about what to expect next, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Nahal Toosi, senior foreign affairs correspondent and columnist for Politico.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Who is in charge in Iran right now?

It’s a very good question. Technically, they’ve said that they’ve appointed an interim council to lead the country for now. It consists of the president, Masoud Pezeshkian — he’s something of a moderate in the Iranian system — and there’s a member of the Guardian Council and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. 

They’re considered hardliners for the most part. But, to be honest, it’s a little bit unclear who is really running the military. There’s a very senior guy named Ali Larijani who has a lot of power, as well. It’s a little vague, especially when the bombs keep raining down.

How did this regime, which, right now, seems to be in complete disarray, survive so many years?

Everything through repression, diplomatic negotiation, balancing its anti-Americanism by appealing to other world powers such as China and Russia. It has used any number of tricks. 

It has had international relations with plenty of countries, if not America, over the years, but, increasingly, it has become isolated, as well. It was getting weaker and weaker, and my sense is that the Trump administration saw a moment of unusual vulnerability and just went for it.

It went for it with the idea, presumably, that if you take out the leaders of the regime, then you get regime change. Is that what is likely to happen here?

The thing about a regime is it’s not just about the people. It’s also about the process of everything from elections to making decisions. It’s about power and how power is allocated within a system. 

The Iranian system was never built around a single cult figure, that type of thing, to where you could just take one person out and everything else would change, and there’d be rainbows, and unicorns, or whatever.

This is a systematic place, and it has been designed to regenerate itself. People step in when other people leave or die. So, what’s different now is that the US and Israel — Israel in particular, because they’re really the ones carrying out the assassinations — have been going after as many figures as they can get, and even ones who aren’t really in power, apparently, like people who might be related to someone in power. 

It depends on how deep they can go to where the whole thing could fall apart. But, then, you still have the armed forces. You still have the paramilitaries. There’s a certain limit. And there’s a certain limit to munitions, for that matter.

Trump said this weekend that he hopes that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the police will work together with Iranian patriots — so, the protesters who’ve been protesting in the streets. 

He’s essentially saying that the military and the police who massacred these protesters earlier this year should now work alongside them. Does it sound likely to you?

Strange times make for strange bedfellows. There’s been reports over the years that there are people in the military, and armed forces, [and] police forces who don’t like the regime, who would prefer to defect. 

A lot of these guys are there collecting a paycheck. At the same time, a lot of these guys killed thousands of Iranian protestors just weeks ago. I’m not saying it can’t happen. Someone might emerge, but I would have a lot of questions.

What does the organized opposition in Iran look like? Is there someone inside of Iran who has the political leverage to take over?

The short answer is no. There’s no real organized opposition inside Iran. There are opposition figures. Many have been thrown in prison, many have just had to flee the country. There are some who are under house arrest, that sort of thing, and some kind of came from the system and tried to change it, and so, they might not have legitimacy in the eyes of many Iranians who really, really want complete regime change. 

There’s just not a real organized group. There are different groups outside Iran who claim to be opposition leaders and organizations to a degree, but many of them have not been inside Iran for a long, long time, and they don’t really have the confidence, and they haven’t really proven themselves as having a ground game inside the country.

Tell me about Reza Pahlavi. It seems like maybe the exiled son of the last shah of Iran might fall into that category.

Yes. He’s been outside the country for nearly 50 years, and, over the decades, he has, every now and then, emerged and tried to make some noise and say, “the US should do something. We should support the people of Iran.”

In recent years, his profile really has risen, but it’s partly because he and his aides have pursued a kind of political polarization approach. They’ve really sided with Republicans. They’ve really been pro-Trump, and they have gone out of their way, especially online, to intimidate and push aside others who are in the opposition. It’s been a pretty divisive approach. 

At the same time, because he has such name recognition inside the country, and because he has managed to raise his profile, it sort of has worked for him so that more and more people, even inside Iran, chant his name. 

Does that mean that he has groups on the ground in the country who can take over institutions and take the armed forces over? I have not seen any evidence of that. 

He says he’s in touch with many Iranian defectors, including from the armed forces, but we really haven’t seen proof of that, and the US officials I speak to do not seem to think he’s a serious player.

What about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? If they take over, is that like a military dictatorship?

Over the years, we have heard reports that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has grown in power and stature inside the system. 

Now, the IRGC is not the normal Iranian military. It reports directly to the supreme leader. It’s very religiously driven, but I’d say there’s a fair amount of interest in the economic side of things for them, because they own large parts of the Iranian economy. 

They are probably in the best position to take power. Even if they put a cleric in front and as a symbol, the real power could lie with the IRGC. And this is a group that could, on the one hand, be very pragmatic, if you say, “look, let’s make money, let’s have peace.”

On the other hand, they could grow even more hardline, and anti-American, and anti-Israel and push even harder with having a nuclear Iran down the line. It’s probably, in many ways, the odds-on favor in terms of seizing the mantle of power in the country.

You well know that the United States has attempted regime change in the Middle East before, and the results were catastrophic. How concerned are you that we are looking down the barrel of another catastrophe here?

If you look at the conflagration in the Middle East right now as a result of these actions, it is deeply concerning. It’s a question of how many countries will get drawn in. 

At some point, the Arab states might feel like they have to attack Iran because it’s been attacking them. This could get very ugly. It could spill across borders. It could destabilize a number of places. Most of all, it could destabilize Iran. 

If you decimate the leadership but, then, nothing rises to take its place, you could have what’s called regime collapse. It could become a chaotic, failed state. 

I do think, though, you have to ask yourself about the really long arc of history. Yes, Afghanistan is a different story. It’s back in the hands of the Taliban, but Iraq, for instance, continues now to hold elections. It’s gone through some very, very tough times, but it is a somewhat functioning democracy. The people there are freer than they were under Saddam Hussein. 

It’s been more than 20 years now, but things do, over time, change. The question is: Is it worth it? Is it worth American lives and American treasure to make this sort of thing happen? I think keeping that nuance in everyone’s mind is really important.

Prenuptial agreements, long exclusive to celebrities and the ultrarich, have trickled down to the rest of us.

A 2023 Axios/Harris poll found that half of US adults say they’re open to signing a prenup, and that younger people are driving the trend. 

Forty-one percent of Gen Z and 47 percent of millennials who are engaged or have been married said they entered a prenup, according to the poll.

There might be several things driving the trend: new apps that make it easier and cheaper to draw up prenups, influencers touting the value of prenups on social media and in podcasts, and young people being more likely to be the children of divorced parents and therefore more realistic about the possibility that their marriage won’t last.

The New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Wilson did a deep dive into the world of prenups, speaking to divorce lawyers, married couples, and others to better understand why prenups are growing in popularity. She shared some of her findings with Today, Explained host Noel King.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What got you thinking and writing about prenups?

I just noticed them all over. You’ve seen prenups on TV shows like Sex and the City or reality shows like Real Housewives. And in those contexts it makes sense because we’re talking about people with a lot of money. The stereotype is that you’ve got a rich guy and he wants to figure out a way to screw his gold-digging younger partner out of her share of the assets. 

But I started seeing prenups appear on shows like Love Is Blind. There was a contestant who worked in HR and she wanted her fiance to sign a prenup, and neither of them really had much money. And I expected the conversation on social media to be sort of making fun of this a little bit. Like, “Come on girl, like, we don’t have any money. We’ve blown it all on avocado toast.” But everyone’s saying, “Absolutely, this is just financial hygiene. This is just being responsible.” 

All over TikTok, there were these personal finance influencers, often female. There’s one who goes by the handle Your Rich BFF, her name’s Vivian Tu, and she had a viral video that said, “What’s in my prenup and in my purse?“ It was a very cutesy conversation about prenups. And she got a lot of support from people online saying, “Yes, every woman should push for a prenup.” 

And also just the numbers of people getting prenups have just risen dramatically. So there was a 2023 Axios/Harris poll that showed that 40 percent of millennials and Gen Z claimed that they had signed a prenup. That number struck a lot of the lawyers I spoke to as way too high, although they all told me that they have seen a big uptick in younger couples asking for prenups. So I just wanted to dig into this phenomenon. 

You have laid out what my understanding of a prenup always was, which is, there’s a rich guy, he’s coming to the marriage with all the money, the woman has no or less money. And so the idea is basically, “I’m going to protect myself from this woman just in case,” a very gendered scenario that I just laid out but, I also think, rooted in some truth. You said it was a woman on Love Is Blind who was like, “I want a prenup,” and she didn’t have money. So what are the differences that we’re seeing here?

You’re right that there is a really big gendered shift. One of the things I researched for this piece are these apps that have just kind of proliferated across the market. Many of their founders are women. One is Hello Prenup. One is called First and that was actually launched by Sheryl Sandberg’s former chief of staff at Facebook, a woman named Libby Leffler. And she absolutely has used very much like “lean in” kind of language around prenups. 

The same way that Sheryl Sandberg was telling women, “You’ve got to negotiate your salary,” now her protege is saying, “Well, you should renegotiate your marriage contract. You would never take on a new job without knowing your compensation package. Why would you enter a marriage without the same know-how?”

I think that one thing that’s really important here to understand is we’re talking about a particular generation, millennials and Gen Z, who are used to thinking about divorce and separation. Twenty-five percent of millennials are the children of divorce or separation. So they’re coming to their new relationships with a certain amount of trauma. And so there was a little bit of that, but not nearly as much as you would think. I think that this generation is just a bit more realistic, that “happily ever after” or “until death do we part” are not realistic ways to think about marriage.

When you were learning about the details of people’s prenups, what surprised you? What really raised your eyebrows or made you go, “Oh damn, they really thought of something there”?

Companies like Hello Prenup, they are offering all sorts of new clauses. So something called a social media image clause, what that does is you can, in your prenup, say for any disparaging content about your ex that you post on social media, you have to pay a financial penalty. And I think that’s because we’ve seen people’s careers be affected by information about what happened in their relationship becoming public. 

So it’s not totally irrational. Millennials are also getting married later. So things like IVF have come up. Hello Prenup also has an embryo clause where you can decide how you want to, for instance, divide embryos in the event of a divorce, and even who’s going to pay for storage fees. 

Even [with] classic clauses like the infidelity clause, you have to be very particular about how you define infidelity these days. I mean, we’re living in an era of ethical non-monogamy. More people are thinking differently about what infidelity is. I interviewed for the piece a divorce lawyer who said that relationships with an AI chatbot, those could conceivably violate an infidelity clause. And she actually said that she’s already telling her clients to be careful about how much, for instance, you even divulge to some of these chatbots because she said you can actually subpoena those conversations and they can come up in a divorce, but also in custody. 

So you heard all of the arguments for prenups, and I imagine, you found some of them very convincing. What are the arguments against prenups?

I think on one level, it feels like people are giving up on a broader kind of social repair to the way that divorce happens now. It’s a privatized solution. 

I also think these are really complicated legal documents, and I don’t think that everyone knows what they’re doing when they press these buttons on an app. For instance, I interviewed a woman who is a theater actress. She does not make a lot of money. She picks up shifts as a cater waiter and at Lululemon, and she married a finance bro, and she insisted on a prenup. She wanted whoever paid the down payment on an apartment or house and covered most of the financials that they would get that property in the event of a divorce. And I thought, what? Why would you do that if you’re the lesser-earning partner? And she said, well, what if I book a show? What if I get a movie?

I also think that there’s a lot of manifesting that can happen in these prenups. I spoke to a researcher who studied something called the optimism bias, and she said that prenup signers suffer from this. So what does that mean? It means that when someone says, you and your partner, do you think you’ll ever get divorced? You’re going to say no. And that actually can impact what you get in a prenup, what you think that you want in a prenup, because you might agree to less favorable terms. You might even ask for less favorable terms because you want to show your partner that you’re not in it for the money. 

I do wonder sometimes what it means to go into the messiness of marriage, thinking so much about “what’s mine, what’s yours?” I do wonder how that works on a day-to-day basis when you’re living complicated lives and things go awry. And life is so unpredictable and I felt really often that the people I was interviewing knew that and they were almost using the prenup to create some certainty.

In recent months, freelance writer Chanté Joseph noticed a surprising trend on her social media feeds: Women had stopped posting pictures of their boyfriends.

For a long time, boyfriend pics were good social media fodder. Whether on vacation or chilling at home, these images sent a message of heterosexual bliss, of contented couplehood. A world, as Joseph wrote, “where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed.”

But then the boyfriends disappeared. You might see a hand, or a shadow, or the back of a head. But the faces of these men were cropped out or blurred out, “as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.”

Women were living their lives, and their guys no longer served their personal brands.

Joseph puzzled this out in an article for Vogue called “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” The piece went viral, sparking a wave of TikTok discourse and prompting a follow-up story a couple of weeks later.

Today, Explained host Astead Herndon called Joseph up to talk about her piece, the reaction it received, and the state of heterosexual dating now.

You wrote what I would think is one of the most memorable pieces of the year, a piece for Vogue that went viral in 2025, specifically about a question that you put into the zeitgeist. Can you tell me about the piece?

The piece was essentially asking this question if having a boyfriend has lost the social standing it once provided women. And I was analyzing this through the lens of social media.

I was looking at the way that women are very private about posting their romantic partners online. A lot of people were sticking emojis over their boyfriend’s heads. We’ve all seen this and I think it started to ramp up, and then it became a little bit of a parody where people would just edit out their boyfriend’s heads completely. 

But then I noticed that people would post their wedding videos or they would post their engagement videos and photos. They were edited in a way that you never knew what the husband looked like. And I was like, “Okay, this is feeling a bit extreme.”

You’re noticing something that has really become clear on the timeline. I remember boyfriend reveals or things like that, but it’s gone to outright hiding. So what did your piece find and what did you even mean by “embarrassing”?

So I found basically three things. 

The first was, people said they didn’t want to do this simply for privacy reasons. And I questioned, “Well, why is it only this area of your life?” And then they would go on to say, “Well, if I posted my boyfriend and he cheated on me next week and I had to go back and delete the pictures…I’d have to deal with the shame of that.” 

But then there were women who just outright thought the idea of having a boyfriend was inherently embarrassing because it didn’t align with the brand. A lot of people felt like, “If I post my boyfriend on Instagram or on social media, I’m indicating something about me to the world that I don’t want people to know.” 

In the piece, one of the comments that I quote is this idea of someone saying, “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” I think it’s the way that the heterosexual romantic relationship has almost been co-opted a little bit by the right. It feels traditionally very conservative. I feel like I’m aligning to this idea of the world that doesn’t really feel natural to me.

I was going to ask specifically about how we should think about this alongside rising trends like “tradwives” and others. Are these things that are happening at the same time? Are these just different communities?

I think they are happening at the same time. I think about the reaction to my piece — whether it’s from the men who were just really angry that I could ever talk disparagingly about men or the women who were very proud of their relationships — feeling as if [it] was an attack on them. 

I think the way we talk about relationships online has changed so much. I was talking about the ReesaTeesa “Who the fuck did I marry?” [series] or the “Danish Deception,” these women coming online making these 60-part TikTok videos, detailing all of the horrible things that have happened to them.

West Elm Caleb. I remember that one.

All of these things. So there is no illusion around the fantasy anymore. And so I think that has gripped a lot of people.

You did a callout on your Instagram, and the responses from followers said that there was “an overwhelming sense…that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was almost a guilty thing to do.” So are we talking here just about, like, shame of heterosexuality partnerships? It seems like straightness is at the core of this.

Oh yeah, 100 percent. And I think this is what really upset people as well. We don’t talk about heterosexuality in this way. We very much see it as a norm. This is just the way to be in society. And so we should never really question what’s going on here. 

But actually, I was like, “No, it’s deeper than that.” So one of the inspirations behind this piece was a book by professor Jane Ward. Her book is called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, and in the book, she has a chapter that is dedicated to the things that queer people say behind their straight friends’ backs. 

And it was absolutely fascinating to get into the perception of straightness, straight people, and straight culture. And I think the idea of embarrassment definitely came from reading that and really realizing the ways that, yeah, straight culture is very embarrassing.

What do you think we’ve learned about straight relationships from this episode?

I think what I’ve learned is that people are still trying to claim the privilege that being in a relationship, particularly a straight relationship, gives them. And I think for some people, their anger to this piece was about them realizing that they might lose this privilege, and they might not have many other privileges. And so losing this feels like a big deal.

Do you feel like you’ve come through this thinking boyfriends are more or less embarrassing?

Do you know what? I think I’ve come away thinking that they’re more embarrassing. I can’t lie because the men are being embarrassing, and the women with boyfriends upset about this piece are even more embarrassing. So I’m like, damn, I might have to double down.