Saying goodbye to Zurich, my home away from home for the past 8 months. Thanks for a great time.

Wildflowers and wild mountains (Grosser Mythen peak, Switzerland)📷

My time in Zurich is almost over but we managed to squeeze in one more quintessentially Swiss experience: going to Germany to buy some things we needed at half the price.

Zurich

If the United States is trying to contain China, then it is doing so in the stupidest way possible: alienating local allies, drawing down stockpiles for an unpopular war in the Middle East, pausing arms shipments to Taiwan, encouraging others to give China a second-look. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Switzerland’s incomparable Lauterbrunnen Valley. (Said to be the inspiration for Tolkien’s Rivendell.) To make it a truly Swiss experience, the photo was taken from a moving train. 📷

Sounds like they're worried about a ballroom blitz.

"When your war aim is 'status quo ante bellum,' you can skip the bellum"—Clausewitz, probably

Congratulations to the pal @adambonica.bsky.social on being named a 2026 Carnegie Fellow. A well-deserved honor for a brilliant political scientist with a real commitment to the public good. news.stanford.edu/stories/2026...

hawks will be like "you really believe in negotiating a joint comprehensive plan of action with Iran? that pales in comparison to my strategy, winning a war of regime change" and then not win a war of regime change

Roberts touted the Court as a “counter-majoritarian check.” But the highest imperatives of counter-majoritarianism in a democracy are don’t let majorities disenfranchise minorities and don’t insulate a majority winner from the rule of law. By his own criterion, his Court has failed spectacularly.

Good long read on Europe’s reactions to German rearmament. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Germany re-arms: what does it mean for Europe?

View on the Stoosbahn, the steepest funicular rail in Europe, with a maximum angle of 47.7 degrees. The circular cabins rotate to keep passengers level.

He’s literally doing the bit from Casablanca.

Royal burial mounds from the 4th-6th century in Gyeongju, South Korea.

So we are back to the old “maximum pressure” campaign of his first term after the JCPOA withdrawal, minus even more credibility and a lot of munitions, plus immense human suffering, the Strait as a new problem, and higher incentives for Iran to go nuclear. Humiliation, maybe escalation later.

there's a japanese antidiarrheal whose packaging proudly claims to have won the russo-japanese war because it was so effective in addressing dysentery

Seoul skyline and Banpo Bridge Rainbow Fountain 📷

Wolji pond in Gyeongju, South Korea

Although I think the Yale report raises some important issues, my main take away was disappointment that a university would provide such a shallow and empirically unsound analysis.

Bet there isn’t an immersive VR experience on the north side of the DMZ. Capitalism ftw

The crazy route my flight just took from Warsaw to Seoul.

Remember the @pewresearch.org data on the decline in Israel's standing in the US published last week? We asked them for the crosstabs which they graciously shared with us, and we're publishing for the 1st time. Bottom line: total collapse of Israel's standing among young Americans across the board.

The Hungarian parliament building, soon under new management.

Magical view of Lake Lucerne from Stoos 📷

Cat statue wishing it were a real cat.

Real fall of the Roman empire vibes here

Competition between the United States and China is a defining feature of contemporary international politics, but not of US foreign policy. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

I knew it was bad but really didn’t appreciate it was quite this bad as.ft.com/r/db911dd6-f...

What’s killing NATO isn’t the European refusals to access to US bases, but Trump’s unilateral decision to redefining NATO as a US force-projection tool rather than a collective defense arrangement. That’s the constitutional coup against the alliance. Europe didn’t break NATO, Trump did.

Instead of criticizing young people for protesting too much or too little or for being wrong or for being right for the wrong reason or before it was popular, older generations should be apologizing profusely for the world we’re bequeathing them and working our butts off to make it better.

I can’t believe this needs to be said: Trump’s genocidal threat *weakened* his bargaining position. It boxed him into a corner from which he desperately needed to find a way out, thus ushering in the what’s probably the least favorable “cease fire” deal in U.S. history.

Can't say I find this characterization of the administration's decision making process very confidence inspiring.

Pivot to ecclesia

I see we’ve reached the “how many divisions does the pope have” stage of megalomania. 🙄

Are the lying liars who lie all the time about everything lying now, when they have every incentive to lie? Sadly, it is impossible to know.

I would be more cautious before making a causal claim about the effectiveness of a threat to commit genocide. Seems like the stakes are high enough.

If this holds (a big if), the major accomplishment will be cutting our losses weeks in rather than years in.

If threatening genocide didn’t cross Republicans’ red line, maybe this will.

Vance should ask President Humphrey how distancing yourself from your president’s unpopular war turns out.

It’s crazy that the vice president openly intervening in a foreign election for the candidate backed by Russia ranks a distant second in insane things happening today.

It is absolute demagoguery to say that a foreign student took anyone's spot. Foreign students have enriched and, bluntly, funded U.S. universities. Those universities will be less successful and less desirable as a result of this rank protectionism.

We are already in the middle of it, and since it started with our invasion of Iraq, 23 years ago (!!), we’ll be very lucky if it only lasts 30 years.

Some of the churches in Zurich have put roses in their fountains for Easter week. It’s a delightful tradition dating back to 2021 (hey, not all traditions have to be centuries old).

The Zürich Polybahn 📷

Steeling myself for when someone says this is a sign of Trump's brilliance. Pull off the band aid, throw them in the cold water -- a shock like this is the only way to get other countries to step up. But, of course, that wasn't the plan. None of this was planned.

Can’t sleep so I’m checking in on the president‘s speech and seeing “we have so much gas” and “it will open up naturally“ so I assume he was talking about something intestinal?

Time for me to reheat my TOSTADA theory: Trump Often Signs Then Abandons Deals Anyway