March 4: Ukraine

What Happened on Day 8 of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Across Ukraine, Russian forces were laying siege to cities and trying to control vital ports. ...... Footage shows the moment a Ukrainian residential area came under bombardment. ....... The strategy, my colleague Eric Schmitt said, is “to terrorize the population and force them to flee, or beg their government to surrender — and to pummel Ukrainian government buildings to disrupt their wartime operations.” ....... The humanitarian disaster is likely to increase in the coming days. “We cannot collect all the bodies,” the deputy mayor of Mariupol, a southern city, told CNN. The mayor said that the electricity was out and that Russia was blocking food from entering the city. ....... More than a million Ukrainians, out of a population of about 40 million, have fled. Many have headed west, away from the areas where Russia is advancing, in the hope of entering bordering countries like Poland or Romania. A million more people are internally displaced. ........ Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, is filled with people carrying suitcases ........ Valerie spoke with one 20-year-old woman traveling with her mother who had packed only three sweatshirts, a pair of socks and her dog. The two of them had left everything else behind. ........ Russia does not yet control the skies over Ukraine, and its military is struggling to make much progress in the north, near Kyiv. A miles-long convoy of hundreds of military vehicles has largely stalled, about 18 miles from Kyiv. It is facing fierce Ukrainian opposition, as well as shortages of fuel and spare parts, a reflection of the failure to conquer Kyiv immediately. ........ some Russian soldiers appeared not to have known that they would be invading Ukraine until the war began ........ a Russian soldier’s text to his mother, recovered from his phone after he died: “There is a real war raging here. I’m afraid. We are bombing all of the cities together, even targeting civilians.” ........ The U.S., E.U. and Britain are continuing to send arms to Ukraine’s military, over land routes. And the West has continued to impose sanctions, which seem to be inflicting significant damage on Russia’s economy. ........ the war, which already seems to be somewhat unpopular within Russia, will become even more so. ........ Putin is signaling that he will respond to setbacks with more destruction. He also seems willing to allow Russia to pay a high price, in both economic terms and soldiers’ lives. ........ During a 90-minute call yesterday with French President Emmanuel Macron, Putin said that Russia would achieve its goal in Ukraine “no matter what.” In a televised address yesterday, Putin told Russians that he was determined to fight the war. ........... Russian leaders have a long history of accepting large casualties among their own troops to win wars. ...... “It doesn’t matter about the morale, it doesn’t matter if the equipment breaks down. They’re just going to be able to overwhelm eventually the Ukrainians because they don’t expect direct military involvement by the West.” ......... The Ukrainian resistance could prove so stout that Russia finds itself in a yearslong quagmire. Or Western sanctions could create such instability in Russia that Putin loses support among the officials around him. ......... the coming weeks are likely to be filled with tragedy for Ukraine. ....... “Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated”: Putin is dismantling the last vestiges of a Russian free press. .

. Seth Meyers Roasts Ron DeSantis for Berating Teens Meyers said Florida’s governor was like “an old man who sees a bunch of innocent teens walking by and screams, ‘Hey, you kids get on my lawn!’” .

. The Week That Awoke the World . “The centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote, before adding, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” .......... The events in Ukraine have been a moral atrocity and a political tragedy, but for people around the world, a cultural revelation. It’s not that people around the world believe new things, but many of us have been reminded what we believe, and we believe them with more fervor, with more conviction. This has been a convicting week. .........

The Ukrainians have been our instructors and inspirers.

........ They’ve been the lady telling a Russian invader to put sunflower seeds in his pocket. They’ve been the thousands of Ukrainians who had been living comfortably abroad, who surged back into the country to risk death to defend their people and way of life. ............ how the setbacks and humiliations (Donald Trump, Afghanistan, racial injustice, political dysfunction) have caused us to doubt and be passive about

the gospel of democracy

. But despite all our failings the gospel is still glowingly true. ........... over the past week Volodymyr Zelensky emerged as the everyman leader — the guy in the T-shirt, the Jewish comedian, the guy who didn’t flee but knew what to say: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” ......... Across governments, businesses and the arts, we were well led this week. ......... the Ukrainians have shown us how the right kind of patriotism is ennobling, a source of meaning and a reason to risk life. They’ve shown us that the love of a particular place, their own land and people, warts and all, can be part and parcel of a love for universal ideals, like democracy, liberalism and freedom. ........... am cheered that Sweden is providing military aid to Ukraine, and I’m awed by what the German people now support. ...... at this point almost every member of Congress is united about our general cause. ........ The creed of liberalism is getting a second wind. ......... this week we saw that foreign affairs, like life, is a moral enterprise, and moral rightness is a source of social power and fighting morale. ......... Things will likely get even more brutal for the Ukrainians. But the moral flame they fueled this week may, in the end, still burn strong. .

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. Fantasy Author Raises $15.4 Million in 24 Hours to Self-Publish Brandon Sanderson set out to raise $1 million on Kickstarter in 30 days to fund four new books. He blew past it in about 35 minutes. ......... The author Brandon Sanderson raised $15.4 million in 24 hours...... Brandon Sanderson, a prolific sci-fi and fantasy author, started an online fund-raising campaign this week to self-publish four of the novels he wrote during the pandemic. His goal: to raise $1 million in 30 days. ......... In 24 hours, he raised $15.4 million, which the fund-raising website Kickstarter said was the single most successful day of any of their campaigns. By Thursday, two days into it, he had raised more than $19 million. ....... Part of why this project has worked for Sanderson, McLean said, is his unique relationship with his fans. He has sold 20 million print, audio and e-books, Sanderson said, including titles such as “Rhythm of War,” an epic fantasy novel about a coalition of humans resisting an enemy invasion. Like many authors of science fiction and fantasy, he has spent a lot of time in conventions and interacting with his audience. In 2019, he said, he was on the road for 111 days. .......... Printing thousands of copies of physical books, then storing and distributing them, is expensive and onerous. To that end, Sanderson has built a company, Dragonsteel Entertainment, which employs 30 people including a marketing director, concept artist, continuity editor and human resources director. He also has a warehouse in Pleasant Grove, Utah, a short drive from his house. ...... Sanderson has been self-publishing e-books since the early 2010s ......... He also has no plans to use his company to publish other authors, he said. What makes him successful is his ability to appeal directly to his own fans, who may not necessarily want to buy work by somebody else. ....... First, he wanted to see what it might look like to poke a little hole in Amazon’s dominance. Amazon sells more than half the printed books in the United States, but it is even more powerful in e-books and audiobooks, which account for 80 percent of Sanderson’s sales .......... “I don’t want to present this as ‘Brandon versus Amazon.’ Amazon’s great. But I think that in the long run, Amazon being a monopoly is actually bad for Amazon. If they don’t have competition, they will stop innovating.” ......... He also wanted to play around with bundling and upselling. Traditional publishers, he said, offer few products and few options. The array of packages on Kickstarter range from $40 for four e-books to $500 for the four books in all formats, plus eight boxes of “swag.” ......... self-publishing e-books remains common for signed authors. ....... “There’s a lot of hybrid publishing out there that is just happening quietly in the background,” McLean said. “It’s just the way sophisticated authors in genres manage their business.” .

. Pankaj Mishra Says Faulkner’s Work Is ‘Atrociously Written,’ and Great . “July’s People,” by Nadine Gordimer. It imagines, with coruscating insight, middle-class white liberals at the mercy of their Black servant during an insurrection against a white supremacist regime. ........ I was enthralled by his vividly realized settings — from Parisian department stores to railway towns — and gaudy characters. I was particularly surprised by his fiction’s intense awareness of the brutal — and, it now seems, politically fateful — French imperial venture in North Africa. ......... many pages in Faulkner’s most celebrated novels are atrociously written. But this terrible and occasionally illegible prose never quite overcomes the reader’s trust in Faulkner’s profound creative power. ......... Mercè Rodoreda’s “In Diamond Square.” Gabriel García Márquez wrote admiringly about her novels, and claimed to have read this one several times. ..... The great realist writers of the 19th century — Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Maupassant, Zola and Dostoyevsky — made the subject central to modern literature. This preoccupation with inequality and its psychological damage lingered among American writers of the first half of the 20th century. ........ This preoccupation with inequality and its psychological damage lingered among American writers of the first half of the 20th century. Rereading recently the Snopes and Studs Lonigan trilogies, I was struck by their insight into the emotional debility and ruthlessness of socially mobile men . ......... The extreme class consciousness of characters in Proust or, for that matter, in Evelyn Waugh and Louis Auchincloss also tells us a great deal about the inner lives deformed by rigidly hierarchical societies. .......... Amitav Ghosh’s “The Nutmeg’s Curse” is an illuminating book by any measure on the historical roots of the climate emergency today. I was particularly struck by its account of the critique by Indigenous peoples of settler-colonialism. ............. I have not lost the unprovable conviction that only Chekhov somehow managed to describe life, as it really is, uncompromised by the artifices of literary creation. .

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I keep hearing evacuation trains from the place where I am now. They are going and going. And I am staying here. Because I won't leave my granny, who doesn't have enough strength to evacuate. I won't leave my husband, who is not allowed to leave. I won't leave my city.

— Nika Melkozerova (@NikaMelkozerova) March 3, 2022

A Man in a Cafe Asked Julie Otsuka What She Was Reading. They Dated for Two Years. Like many writers, I’m a very solitary person, but I love reading and working in public spaces....... alone but not alone ..... a farewell note from the author, who took his own life 10 days after turning in the manuscript ......... Through an accretion of small, obsessive details, “you” slowly comes into focus as a thoughtful, solitary, troubled man who can no longer bear to be in the world. The language is beautiful and spare, deceptively simple, exactingly precise. I’ve never read anything like it. It is, one could say, the ultimate work of autofiction. ......... Nobody describes the passionate bond between mothers and daughters more brutally, or with more honesty, intelligence and style, than Vivian Gornick in her memoir “Fierce Attachments.” ...... I could look at paintings all day long. That’s my true guilty pleasure....... Ogawa is a master of quiet dread and I am eager to read her latest book, set on an unnamed island where entire categories of objects are suddenly “disappeared” from both the physical world and the memories of its inhabitants, who are under constant surveillance by the government.

Online Dating Can Kill You. Literally. the world of social media, big tech and internet connectivity provides fertile new ground for humans to deceive, defraud and possibly murder one another......... The question of whether the people we encounter online are who they say they are is a genuinely troubling one. Are they cheaters, frauds, psychos — or something even weirder and scarier? What if they are not people at all, but bots, or as Pek dubs them, “synths,” created to deceive and control us? Are we surrendering to algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves? Are we trading our freedom of choice, thought, even desire, for convenience and fantasy? Are we becoming unable to tell, or even care, what’s real? Exploring these issues, “The Verifiers” leads us deeper and deeper into a maze with no clear exit. Except of course to delete our apps and stop searching for truth and happiness online. But we won’t ever do that. Will we?

Why Olga Tokarczuk Likes to Read T.S. Eliot in Translation literature is its own republic where people can live and work together and, maybe more than anything, communicate perfectly — in depth, empathetically, morally, intellectually and in a revolutionary spirit ........ The constitution is made up of passages from great books, and the history of the republic is also the history of literature, all the classics and all the literary eras that preceded ours. .......... The strange thing is that fictional characters live alongside the citizens of this republic ....... I really think the best genre is just a good, solid novel. ........ I was a voracious reader. I taught myself to read quite early on, and from that point forward, I read everything that fell into my grasp. ........ I loved to read encyclopedias and dictionaries. Fairly quickly I started reading novels ........

Authors are generally less interesting than their books.

..... those who read are smarter, more aware, more capable of understanding complicated matters than those who don’t read
An Essayist Navigates the Labyrinth of American Health Care. Barely. . The illness narrative, ending in financial ruin and decreased quality of life, has become one of the classic 21st-century American stories. ...... For Maloney, the primary experience of receiving health care is not merely a bodily or spiritual event but always, also, a financial one. ........ The precipitating event in “Cost of Living” is the author’s psychiatric hospitalization at 19: “It wasn’t that I had wanted to die, exactly. It was more that I just couldn’t keep living.” Maloney’s choice of a nearby, independent hospital’s emergency room over the bigger university hospital “where the state might pick up your bill if you were declared indigent” leads to the crushing debt at the heart of the book. “Sitting on a cot in the emergency room, I filled out paperwork certifying myself as the responsible party for my own medical care — signed it without looking, anchoring myself to this debt, a stone dropped in the middle of a stream. This debt was the cost of living.” ........ As Maloney pries deeper into the machine of American health care, she finds no central mechanism other than that of the eternal money-go-round. By the time she gets to the conference at which doctors are painstakingly comped for their attendance at brunches with “soggy pastries” amid “transfer of value” concerns, I had lost all hope for a ready solution to the problem — which, Maloney implies, is inseparable from the very structures of capitalism. .......... In one, Maloney is prescribed 26 psychiatric medications for what turns out to be a vitamin D deficiency, hypothyroidism and a neurologically based developmental disorder. In another, as an E.R. tech she is trained to “bill up” — increasing charges if at all possible — but she secretly perfects the occult art of minimizing patient cost without tripping any corporate alarms. ........... “There’s a fine line between a pain patient and a drug addict,” she writes, “and sometimes patients go back and forth across it.” “Elizabeth … was what we called a frequent flier, someone who was unable to make sense of the world she lived in and so she came to us instead, a kind of tent revival in our suburban hospital, for healing.” ......... “Yes, the research everyone does is important. Yes, the work to take a drug from preclinical stages to the market is huge and hugely expensive. But the rest — the advertising, the television commercials, the hamburger sliders, the endless catered lunches, the agency money, the plane tickets to Europe — are all, directly or not, contributing to this enormous cost.” ..........

in this country, there is currently no tidy passage through the interconnected quagmires of illness, money and care.

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Ukraine Invasion Increases Friction Between Erdogan and Putin The Turkish and Russian leaders have found themselves on opposite sides of a host of armed conflicts. In Ukraine, the stakes may be higher than ever. ...... The stuck planes have now become Exhibit A of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s misreading of the Ukraine situation, opening him to criticism at home for not evacuating Turkish citizens in time, for misjudging President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and for not taking American warnings of an invasion seriously enough. ........... Turkey is being squeezed from several sides by Russia. ........ Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan have in recent years found themselves on opposite sides of conflicts in Azerbaijan, Libya and Syria. .......... Russian troops in Syria have long threatened to press their offensive against the last rebel-held area in that country, which could force up to four million Syrians to flee into Turkey. ......... Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Putin spoke on the telephone on Feb. 23, hours before the start of the invasion. Mr. Erdogan repeated his offer of mediation between Russia and Ukraine and reiterated his invitation to Mr. Putin to visit Istanbul for a meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. ......... there is a sense of anger in Mr. Erdogan’s presidential circle that Mr. Putin lied to them about his intentions in Ukraine ........ “I suspect Erdogan trusted his relationship with Putin and thought it would be a minor incursion,” she added. “Turkey also failed to evacuate its citizens based on that belief. That’s proving to be a huge miscalculation.” ......... Turkey oversees access to the Black Sea through the Montreux Convention, a 1936 international treaty that regulates sea vessels passing through the Bosporus. Defining the situation as war would allow Turkey to close the Bosporus to vessels of the countries involved. ....... the borders are clogged with tens of thousands of refugees and 20-mile tailbacks .

A War the Kremlin Tried to Disguise Becomes a Hard Reality for Russians Moscow posted a death toll from its attack on Ukraine for the first time, and Russians who long avoided politics are now grappling with the fact that their country is fighting a deadly conflict....... On Feb. 23, Razil Malikov, a tank driver in the Russian Army, called his family and said he would be home soon; his unit’s military drills in Crimea were just about wrapping up. The next morning, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Malikov hasn’t been heard from since. ........... “Everyone is in a state of shock.” The reality of war is dawning across Russia. ........ Russians who long avoided engaging with politics are now realizing that their country is fighting a deadly conflict, even as the Kremlin gets ever more aggressive in trying to shape the narrative. Its slow-motion crackdown on freedoms has become a whirlwind of repression of late, as the last vestiges of a free press faced extinction. ......... This week, lawmakers proposed a 15-year prison sentence for people who post “fakes” about the war, and rumors are swirling about soon-to-be-closed borders or martial law. The Education Ministry scheduled a video lesson to be shown in schools nationwide on Thursday that described the war against Ukraine as a “liberation mission.” ........ Ukrainian government agencies and volunteers have published videos of disoriented Russian prisoners of war saying they had no idea they were about to be part of an invasion until just before it began, and photographs and footage showed the bodies of Russian soldiers strewn on streets and fields. ......... at least 7,359 Russians detained during seven days of protests in scores of cities across the country. ........ “It’s the third decade of the 21st century, and we are watching news about people burning in tanks and bombed-out buildings,” Aleksei A. Navalny, the opposition leader, wrote in a social media post from prison on Wednesday, calling on Russians to continue to rally despite the withering police crackdown. “Let’s not ‘be against war.’ Let’s fight against war.” ....... dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine lay “unburied; wild, stray dogs gnawing on bodies that in some cases cannot be identified because they are burned.” ..... “I do not identify myself with those representatives of the state that speak out in favor of the war,” Ms. Narusova said. “I think they themselves do not know what they are doing. They are following orders without thinking.” ...... The Russian International Affairs Council, a government-funded think tank, published an article by a prominent expert describing the war as a strategic debacle. The expert, Ivan Timofeev, said Ukrainian society would now “see Russia as an enemy for several decades to come.” He added a veiled warning directed at government officials who were now cracking down on people speaking out against the war. ........ Some feared that Mr. Putin could go even further, repressing dissent to an extent unseen in Russia since Soviet times. Tatiana Stanovaya, a scholar who has long studied Mr. Putin, wrote it was “more than logical” to expect that lawmakers this week would approve the imposition of martial law in order to block the open internet, ban all protests and restrict Russians from being able to leave the country. ......... Echo of Moscow, Russia’s flagship liberal-leaning radio station, was taken off the air on Tuesday for the first time since the Soviet coup attempt of 1991. ....... “When there were analogous situations in other countries involving the United States, there were no such attacks, and they didn’t drive the country into crisis.” .

Last Vestiges of Russia’s Free Press Fall Under Kremlin Pressure “Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated,” a Nobel Prize winning editor said as Russian authorities moved to control the narrative in the Ukraine war. ........ As President Vladimir V. Putin wages war against Ukraine, he is fighting a parallel battle on the home front, dismantling the last vestiges of a Russian free press. ....... On Thursday, the pillars of Russia’s independent broadcast media collapsed under pressure from the state. Echo of Moscow, the freewheeling radio station founded by Soviet dissidents in 1990 and that symbolized Russia’s new freedoms, was “liquidated” by its board. TV Rain, the youthful independent television station that calls itself “the optimistic channel” said it would suspend operations indefinitely. And Dmitri A. Muratov, the journalist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said that his newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which survived the murders of six of its journalists, could be on the verge of shutting down as well.

“Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated,” Mr. Muratov said.

......... Mr. Putin appeared unbowed by the crisis and the Western furor. He told President Emmanuel Macron of France in a phone call that his aim of securing “the demilitarization and neutral status of Ukraine” would be “achieved no matter what,” according to the Kremlin. A second round of peace talks in Belarus yielded no breakthrough, though Ukraine said Russia had agreed to “humanitarian corridors” to allow civilians to leave areas of intense fighting. ........ Many Russians, however, have not bought into the narrative. Lukoil, Russia’s second-biggest oil producer, on Thursday became the biggest Russian company to publicly distance itself from the war, publishing a statement from its board of directors calling for its “soonest cessation.” .........

“There’s a very broad antiwar mood in Russia

— I’d say it’s genetic,” Aleksei A. Venediktov, Echo of Moscow’s longtime editor in chief, said in an interview on Thursday, referring to the lingering scars of World War II. “War is not victory. War is horror, it is tragedy, it is loss in every family.” ........... For a few seconds, Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” appeared. During the 1991 attempt to overthrow the Soviet Premier Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Soviet state television played “Swan Lake” on a loop. ....... It did the same as the country waited for the party leadership to select successors to Soviet premiers Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov. It was a not so subtle hint: Even Mr. Putin is not forever. ....... in a “regular country,” Echo of Moscow would be considered banal. “We’ve held on to old-fashioned, traditional journalism where all points of view must be shared and where forbidden topics can be discussed, political and not” ........... “They want to give the population the impression that this is a short, effective, operation without a lot of victims,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. “The regime gives a lot of attention to words, or to the lack of words.” He drew the example of Mr. Navalny, an opposition figure in Russia whom Mr. Putin does not refer to by name. .