First: thanks to Dara, Ned, Daniel and Matt for a wonderful weekend-plus’ guestbloggery. I ended up breathing deeply and leaving my computer at home in order to enforce vacationing, something that also rationed my iPhone usage. A pleasant second-order effect of that decision is not to know what was on my blog for three days, and that leads to the joyous third-order effect of reading my own blog as a fan, catching up on some great stuff by some great young writers on the rise. Hopefully you’ve already added the work of these Young Avengers to your RSS when possible.

Now: What better way to start off one’s return to Washington than by being ignored? Shorter Washington Post: Obama started out by moving U.S. foreign relations away from interpersonal meetings with leaders and toward relationships between peoples. But over the past two weeks, he met with Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamid Karzai! And while he’s still emphasizing relationships between peoples, clearly we now have evidence of a Subtle Shift! We certainly don’t have evidence of a tendentious frame that we set up for the purpose of refuting — an easy job, given the natural and inevitable interaction between foreign leaders as a presidency advances — in order to land something in the paper!