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Putin’s war on truth warps reality for all of us

Putin’s war on truth warps reality for all of us

Katie Stallard writes: The Russian president is the latest in a long line of dictators to manipulate history and manufacture enemies to rally the population against and secure his own hold on power. Past Soviet leaders have drawn on the same core themes, and I have seen this playbook in action in China and North Korea, where Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un insist that they too are defending their nations against hostile foreign adversaries. Yet we must not assume…

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American nationalist: How Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news

American nationalist: How Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news

Nicholas Confessore writes: Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss. Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an…

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The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

Elizabeth Preston writes: On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than…

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Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements

Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements

Nature reports: One of nuclear physicists’ top wishes is about to come true. After a decades-long wait, a US$942 million accelerator in Michigan is officially inaugurating on 2 May. Its experiments will chart unexplored regions of the landscape of exotic atomic nuclei and shed light on how stars and supernova explosions create most of the elements in the Universe. “This project has been the realization of a dream of the whole community in nuclear physics,” says Ani Aprahamian, an experimental…

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The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

The war in Ukraine is a colonial war

Timothy Snyder writes: When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it. Empire’s story divides subjects…

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The core of Putin’s weakness

The core of Putin’s weakness

John Sipher writes: In a recent discussion with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin put the recent invasion in historical context. According to Kotkin, “What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a…

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Oil middlemen fueled Putin’s war machine, but now they’re getting out

Oil middlemen fueled Putin’s war machine, but now they’re getting out

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia built a self-proclaimed fortress around its economy in the run-up to war—but there was a crack. Moscow depended on foreign middlemen to ferry its most strategic and lucrative export around the world: oil. Now the most-important middleman, Trafigura Group, is joining several competitors in cutting off Russian giant Rosneft Oil Co. from global oil markets. In a high-stakes move that goes farther than official Western sanctions, the Swiss commodities trader plans to stop exporting…

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Getting real on climate means facing necessity

Getting real on climate means facing necessity

Bill McKibben writes: “Realism” is the high ground in politics—a high ground from which to rain down artillery fire on new ideas. To wit, this week the New York Times profiled Canadian energy analyst Vaclav Smil, who—alongside others like Daniel Yergin—has long insisted that the transformation from fossil fuels to hydrocarbons must take a long time. Smil is a good writer and a smart historian; he’s documented the many-decades-long transitions from, say, wood to coal, and coal to oil as…

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FBI conducted potentially millions of searches of Americans’ data last year, report says

FBI conducted potentially millions of searches of Americans’ data last year, report says

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy. An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security…

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Seven hours of sleep is optimal in middle and old age, say researchers

Seven hours of sleep is optimal in middle and old age, say researchers

University of Cambridge and Fudan University: Sleep plays an important role in enabling cognitive function and maintaining good psychological health. It also helps keep the brain healthy by removing waste products. As we get older, we often see alterations in our sleep patterns, including difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, and decreased quantity and quality of sleep. It is thought that these sleep disturbances may contribute to cognitive decline and psychiatric disorders in the aging population. In research published today…

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Why Russia bungled its invasion of Ukraine

Why Russia bungled its invasion of Ukraine

Jeffrey Edmonds writes: Many of us who analyze the Russian military for a living have been shocked to see Russian forces fumble the way they have in Ukraine. There are already some heated calls for analytical accountability, most prominently from Eliot Cohen and Phillips Payson O’Brien, into how the body of Russian military analysts could have gotten the Russian military so wrong. There is no doubt that the Russian military has performed much more poorly than most anticipated and it…

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‘Russia is fighting — but Ukraine is winning’

‘Russia is fighting — but Ukraine is winning’

William M Arkin reports: Russia has stumbled again. Its southern offensive, the second phase of the Ukraine war, has failed to be the “biggest tank war since World War II,” as some analysts were predicting. Instead, Russia’s ground forces have shown the same lackluster performance on the ground, unable to break through anywhere. The towns and villages of the south, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday, “are the places where the fate of this war and the future of our…

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Roots of the resistance: Understanding national identity in Ukraine

Roots of the resistance: Understanding national identity in Ukraine

Aaron Erlich writes: Were Ukrainians sending signals to the world prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion that they believed, as Putin does, that they and Russians were part of “one people?” In the aftermath of the first stage of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, reporting has emerged that Russia expected to quickly win the war and consolidate its military victory by coopting local elected officials and citizens, who were expected to rejoice in or at least countenance Russian occupation. Social science…

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