Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily political dispatch from the nation’s capital!

Some of us, and I won’t say who, are still recovering from D.C.’s biggest social weekend of the year, because some of us just aren’t the party animals we used to be. It’s also because this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner weekend was extremely packed with events—Semafor’s Steve Clemons told Playbook he went to 17 parties! (How’s that for a D.C. sentence?)—perhaps more so than at any time since everyone started scaling back on parties because of Donald Trump’s assault on the press (“enemies of the people,” anyone?) made carousing with his henchmen at the Washington Hilton a bit unseemly. And then came the pandemic and completely killed the dinner for a couple years. When “nerd prom” came back last year, it was far more muted and far less insane—though some of us and many, many others came down with Covid afterwards. Some of us liked the understated iteration of...

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