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 Let's start with what just happened in the last 48 hours, because this is not a drill. CENTCOM posted three images to their official account that you absolutely need to see. Image one — F/A-18 Super Hornets launching off the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea. The caption? "Maintaining peak readiness." Image two — US sailors aboard the USS Comstock actively blocking commercial vessels, squeezing Iran's ability to generate revenue. 97 ships redirected. Four disabled. And then image three — and this is the one that every surviving IRGC general in Tehran is studying right now under a fluorescent light in a bunker somewhere — US Marines driving an M142 HIMARS rocket artillery system to a refueling station somewhere in the Middle East. These aren't press releases. These are not photo ops for a social media strategy. This is CENTCOM publishing a targeting menu on the public internet. And Iran is reading it. Here is where we are right now. Negotiations a...

Nobody is ready for Rome. You think you are. You have seen the photographs. You have watched the films. You have heard people describe it — the Colosseum, the fountains, the pasta, the golden light that falls across everything in the late afternoon like the city itself is on fire from the inside. You think you have a picture of what it is going to be. And then you land. And then you step outside. And then Rome looks at you the way Rome has been looking at visitors for two thousand seven hundred years — with a calm, absolute confidence that it is unlike anything you have ever encountered and that nothing you brought with you has prepared you for it. This is not a city. It is a living museum that forgot to put up the velvet ropes. It is a place where you turn a corner looking for a coffee and find yourself standing in front of a wall that was built before the birth of Christ. Where the cobblestones under your feet have been walked on by emperors and gladiators and saints and artists and ...