Thousands of Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russia. “I didn’t want to go,” one girl told The New York Times from a foster home near Moscow.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/world/europe/ukraine-children-russia-adoptions.html
“Our family is like a small Russia,” Ms. Druzhinina said in an interview. “Russia took in four territories, and the Druzhinin family took in four children.”
High-level defections! Tiger Woods and Jared Kushner! Lawsuits and blacklists! Is the new LIV league a way to reward players, or the vanity project of a despot, or something else?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/will-the-saudis-and-donald-trump-save-golf-or-wreck-it
To appeal to the Dubai-inclined, M.B.S. has lifted a ban on cinemas, courted music festivals, and reined in the religious police. A ski resort is in the works. Schenker and others predict that M.B.S. will legalize drinking in some form when he assumes the throne. The centerpiece of his plans is Neom, which he has described, privately, as Dubai but better. According to the Wall Street Journal, he envisioned sand that glows in the dark and an artificial moon; canals for swim-commuting have been mentioned. The project, which is expected to consume half a trillion dollars, is a money pit; according to Bloomberg, Neom’s C.E.O. displays a graphic that former employees called the “wall of shame,” showing department heads who failed to spend enough. But other developments, elsewhere on the Red Sea and around Riyadh, are farther along. Included in the plans is an amenity that the Saudis believe will draw wealthy Westerners: golf.
For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and see their cartoonish heroes and villains.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/magazine/russian-action-movies.html
Another is that “Granit” was just one artifact in a whole trove of content — memoirs, comic books, travel videos — that is variously referred to as the Wagner subculture, the Wagnerverse or the Wagner Extended Universe. Not unlike old American mercenary magazines, all of it puts a righteous and alluring face on going off to kill and die in unofficial operations aligned with Kremlin interests
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.