Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse! I’m writing to you from yet another series of airport lounges, this time, en route to the Aspen Security Forum, my favorite of the national security conferences.

The last time I was there, in 2018, I—along with many other attendees—was driven around by an Uber driver who completely freaked everyone out, in part because it was the height of Russiagate spy mania, in part because this Uber driver had been to North Korea and asked detailed questions about the D.N.I. Anyway! More next week about what the spooks and the natsec nerds yukked it up over in the high-altitude meadows of Aspen. For now, Leibo!

I mean, who can forget his blistering, bullseye coinages, like “power mourners,” from his book This Town? The book, like all of Mark’s political journalism...

Mark Leibovich: It’s any place where people don’t see the larger picture. A lot of Washington is a classic Bubble World, in that it becomes its own reality. It’s a parochial world where you assume that the privilege of your life and the people that you see every day are something resembling the reality of most of the world. It’s something we journalists in Washington are very susceptible to—Bubble World both as a habitat but also as a way of looking at the world.

You refer a couple of times in the book to the “media geniuses.” Which is very funny, but you make a more serious point about how they keep getting it wrong...