Live from the Eurovision Song Contest
reporting from Basel
I spent last week covering the 69th edition of Eurovision in Basel, Switzerland. The 2025 rendition of the world’s most popular song contest (and television broadcast) met its usual quota of camp, paradox, provocation, sequins, geopolitics, scandal, and irony. Unusually, most artists sang in their native language (which is to say, not in English).
I wrote up a full report here for Foreign Policy.
Eurovision was founded in 1956 to promote cooperation in postwar Europe. Things have changed (today, Azerbaijan, Israel, Georgia and Australia are all veteran extra-continental participants), but its “nonpolitical” mission has stayed the same. In my coverage, I focused especially on the political power of what one historian told me is “the largest cultural event bringing Europeans together” in a moment when the transatlantic relationship has reached its lowest nadir since the Iraq War. In other words:
“You might say Eurovision is, in fact, a rare example of what that post-transatlantic future might look like: a model of the West without America. For despite the influence of American music on artists and the general rise of global Anglophone hegemony, the contest remains, Vuletic said, “quintessentially European.” Is its ethos—that is to say, spandex, sequins, and the inalienable right to let your freak flag fly—the force holding together the last bastion of the contemporary Western order? Is this annual celebration of diversity and self-expression not, in some way, what liberalism is?”
Well?
You can read the rest here.
In other news…
I reviewed Yiyun Li’s heartbreaking memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, which memorializes her son on his own terms, for 4Columns. It also cropped up in LitHub’s weekly round-up of reviews you need to read.
I’m on Deutsche Welle’s Inside Europe Podcast for a special security episode covering everything from Hungarian spy rings to (my own expertise) Switzerland’s famous nuclear bunkers. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but if you want a bonus tour of the actual bunker in the basement of my own apartment block — plus a recap of my recent reporting on Switzerland’s civilian bunker program for The Dial — you can skip ahead to ~34:00.
And if you’re having one of those days, you can also watch the entirety of this year’s Eurovision finals here. (Tip: Estonia and Latvia were among my favorites.)