Welcome to your Friday Daily. 

Not many writers go deep on the Spartans these days unless they’re covering football at Michigan State. Ned Temko, our London-based connector of global dots, does so today, dusting off the story of the big-shouldered power play by Athens, during its war with Sparta, against the tiny island colony of Melos. Ned shows shades of a cautionary parallel in modern U.S. foreign policy. 

Back in 2022, Ned joined me on a podcast episode to talk about how he approaches his Patterns column, a reboot of Pattern of Diplomacy, which was bashed out on a manual typewriter for years by the late, rumpled-but-refined Monitor legend Joseph C. Harsch. You can listen or read about Ned and about his own take on Patterns – and see him in his book-crammed garden writing shed – here.