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After repelling Russia’s assault earlier this year, the city awakens to missile strikes.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/kyivs-peace-is-destroyed
the woman, whose name was Oleksandra, was laughing. “She said that Halloween is coming up and she’s already putting on her scary costume,” the medic said. Then he explained that pieces of shrapnel were still lodged in her head; they would have to be removed at the hospital.
For an unconventional former Marine colonel, Ukraine represents the morally just war that eluded him his entire career. But how much can he and his military start-up help?
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/world/europe/ukraine-war-americans.html
Though Mr. Milburn is not involved in the actual fighting, he is constantly risking his life. On a recent day in Soledar, he and his colleagues were nearly hit by Russian rockets. Minutes after that, as they were changing a flat tire that had been shredded by shrapnel, a fighter jet swooped down on them, shooting more rockets and sending them scurrying into the bushes.
Hundreds of decapitated goat carcasses have turned up in the river that runs through metro Atlanta. Are they evidence of animal sacrifice? Drug smuggling? Both?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-mystery-of-the-headless-goats-in-the-chattahoochee
Ulseth had boated it a hundred times before. “But, this time,” he told me recently, “I saw something white off on the side near the bridge.” He pulled the boat over to the bank. “There were eight or nine baby decapitated goats just floating in the water. The ladies flipped their shit.”
via Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-storykeeper-a-conversation-with-svetlana-alexievich/
I think that war is a measure of human horror. It is the biggest kind of horror that humanity can experience. For example, what’s happening in Ukraine today is an incredible force working upon us. In the first months when I started to write my book about Chornobyl, I realized that I was limited within this frame. People began to fear water, to fear sitting on the ground, to fear giving flowers as gifts. They feared everything, but primarily the earth. Death was all around. Death was no longer unfamiliar. Then I understood that all our previous knowledge about horror turned out to be weak, turned out to be from another life. We have already become caught in a transitional moment, a transition from one world to another, to the world of the future, this horrifying future where civilization and progress bring us war.
Mentions in Twitter posts on the right have spiked during major political news events, and experts worry the overheated language will spread as the midterm elections draw near.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/us/politics/civil-war-social-media-trump.html
In August, a single tweet stating “I think civil war has just been declared” managed to reach over 17 million profiles despite coming from an account with under 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli firm that monitors misinformation.
Ultima Online is celebrating its 25th anniversary! You know what that means, right? Story time!
via Medium: https://blog.cotten.io/that-time-we-burned-down-players-houses-in-ultima-online-7e556618c8f0
Create a straw dummy labeled “An Effigy of a Traitor” to place in the middle of the burning rubble.
After Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, ended a decades-long border conflict, he was heralded as a unifier. Now critics accuse him of tearing the country apart.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/did-a-nobel-peace-laureate-stoke-a-civil-war
In “Crabs in a Bucket,” a forthcoming book, the Somali author Nuruddin Farah likens Ethiopian politics to a destructive Groundhog Day. Farah, who is seventy-six, grew up in a part of Somalia that was ceded to Ethiopia by the colonial British after they ousted the Italians in the Second World War. “Think of a demolition site when you think about Ethiopia, a country under constant rebuilding, one whose laws are often dismantled to accommodate the new ruler, and whose peoples’ nerves are frequently shredded before another regime gains power, only to demolish what has gone on before,” Farah writes. “Ethiopian leaders are famous for telling big and small porky pies to their fellow citizens and to the rest of the world; they know how to start conflicts that lead to wars, not how to resolve conflicts.”
In phone calls to friends and relatives at home, Russian soldiers gave damning insider accounts of battlefield failures and civilian executions, excoriating their leaders just weeks into the campaign to take Kyiv.
Russian soldiers made thousands of calls from the battlefield in Ukraine to relatives at home. Here are their conversations
Poof! Just like that, what was secret is now not secret, all through the power of your beautiful, enormous, manifesting mind.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/the-power-of-positive-declassifying
As you become more practiced in the power of positive declassifying, you will acquire the ability to declassify entire tranches of documents in a single go. At first, even one document containing the address and spouse’s and children’s names of a spy will feel like a lot. But, in time, you will be able to think of a foreign country and, just by remembering what people from there smell like, declassify all files relating to it.
The push to claim new territory and mobilize more troops is unlikely to reverse Russia’s losses on the battlefield—but it could move the war into its most dangerous phase yet.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-escalation-in-ukraine-is-a-losing-strategy
We are fighting alone, whereas Ukraine has many allies. And, as the fight goes on, we will have less and less modern weapons, but Ukraine will only receive more
The Breitbart film is an amateurish, often batshit satire-cum-thriller-cum-melodrama-cum-propaganda-organ, which switches between modes with the unexpectedness of a Surrealist cutup.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/my-son-hunter-is-not-the-hunter-biden-movie-we-need-or-the-one-we-deserve
The movie promises to include, among its revelations, “Sex, Prostitution, Drugs, Cronyism, Money Laundering, More Sex, a Laptop from Hell,” not to mention “Chinese Spies, Ukrainian ‘Businessmen,’ ” and “the Selling Out of America.” As they say, don’t threaten me with a good time!
The last surviving leader of the regime that killed 1.7 million Cambodians lost his appeal on Thursday. Some victims think the long, expensive tribunal was a hollow exercise.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/world/asia/cambodia-khmer-rouge-tribunal.html
It spent over $330 million. In the end, it convicted just three people
A cache of nearly 160,000 files from Russia’s powerful internet regulator provides a rare glimpse inside Vladimir V. Putin’s digital crackdown.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/22/technology/russia-putin-surveillance-spying.html
Unlike more technologically savvy counterparts in China, where internet surveillance is more automated, much of the work of Russian censors is done manually, the documents show. But what Russia lacks in sophistication it has made up for in determination
Andy Campbell details the history of an ascendant far-right group.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/books/review/andy-campbell-we-are-proud-boys.html
“I have superhuman strength,” said McInnes, who publicly resigned from the Proud Boys in late 2018. “I’m smarter than ever before. I also crave my wife in a way that’s unprecedented.”
The former President is likely signalling to prosecutors that he won’t go quietly, so they had better beware.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-is-trump-openly-embracing-qanon-now
At a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday night, for the Republican Senate candidate J. D. Vance, Trump played background music that the Times described as “all but identical” to a song associated with the QAnon right-wing conspiracy movement. Many people in the crowd responded with a one-armed salute, with their index finger raised, that reminded some observers of Nazi rallies
A new report from the Human Rights Office found “widespread arbitrary deprivation of liberty of Uyghyrs and other predominantly Muslim communities.” Some activists think it didn’t go far enough.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-hasnt-the-un-accused-china-of-genocide-in-xinjiang
The most important element of the report is that the violations in Xinjiang and the policies carried out in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity under international human-rights law. This means that China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang, which is extraordinarily significant.
Luke Mogelson discusses his new book, “The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible,” and the precarious future of democracy.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/how-a-war-correspondent-understands-far-right-extremism
I was surprised by how frightened many Americans on the far right are. I was prepared for the anger, but I hadn’t really understood the extent to which fear precedes it. I was in Nashville on Christmas when Anthony Warner, who believed that alien lizards disguised as human beings roamed the planet, blew himself up downtown. That’s an extreme example, but so many people I met at anti-lockdown protests, pro-Trump events, and Stop the Steal rallies told me that they were genuinely terrified of their fellow-citizens on the left, especially after the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
In a political environment where book-banning efforts are being used to drive voter sentiment, librarians find themselves on the front lines.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/magazine/book-bans-texas.html
By January, the commissioners court had voted to dissolve the library board and appointed a new one, which included those who had originally advocated for restricting the butt books. Community members and librarians began attending the new meetings, taking notes and asking to make public statements about the bans. The county then decided the meetings would no longer be open to the public.
The attention commanded by the W.N.B.A. star, detained by Russia on a minor drug charge, could improve things for other Americans wrongfully detained around the world.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/getting-brittney-griner-home
Brittney Yevette Griner grew up in Houston, Texas, the daughter of a homemaker and a cop. It was a fairly ordinary upbringing, except that it quickly became clear to Griner, and to everyone else, that she was not ordinary. “I guess I started feeling different when everybody started telling me I was,” she writes in her memoir, “In My Skin.” “At home, I was a carefree, curious, mischievous little girl. At school, I was a freak.”
At the Capitol riot and elsewhere, MAGA Republicans have leaped from “backing the blue” to attacking law-enforcement officials.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-trump-supporters-came-to-hate-the-police
“We have guns, too, motherfuckers!” a man yelled over him. “With a lot bigger rounds!” Another added, “If we have to tool up, it’s gonna be over! We’re coming heavy!” I also overheard a woman talking on her phone. “We need to come back with guns,” she said. “One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again.”