IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
1. How the UK welcomed Putin’s man in Ukraine
The story of how Oligarch Dmitry Firtash was welcomed into the British establishment, despite being wanted by the FBI.
(The Guardian, approx 25 mins reading time)
Thanks to his alliance with Gazprom and by extension with Putin, Firtash had gained extraordinary wealth and power. He was the Kremlin’s man in Ukraine, a gas-fuelled kingmaker. In his home country, Firtash became a controversial figure, accused of restoring Russia’s influence over their homeland. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he started looking around for a foreign country where he might buy a second home. He chose the UK.
2. Putin tries to redraw the world
Allan Little looks at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, taking in wider European history along the way.
(BBC, approx 15 mins reading time)
First, he believed the West was in chronic decline, weakened by internal division and ideological rancour. The election of Donald Trump and Brexit he saw as proof of this. The rise of right-wing authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary was further evidence of the disintegration of liberal values and institutions. The US’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was proof of a waning power withdrawing from the world stage.
A look at the terrifying situation people living in Mariupol are in because of the invasion by Russia.
(AP, approx 11 mins reading time)
Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol — about one a minute at times — drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russia’s domination of Ukraine. This southern seaport of 430,000 has become a symbol of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drive to crush democratic Ukraine — but also of a fierce resistance on the ground.
Can the world ditch fossil fuels?
(The New Yorker, approx 35 mins reading time)
So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.”
Can we use technology to reshape our dreams?
(Harper’s, approx 31 mins reading time)
There’s a laptop on the bedside table; the screen shows fluctuating green and red lines. Adam Haar Horowitz, who is running the experiment, speaks to me over Zoom, monitoring my somatic information. The device I wear is called a Dormio. It was developed by Adam and a team of professors and researchers at the MIT Media Lab to facilitate “dream incubation,” the shaping of dreams according to words or images chosen by the dreamer. I’m wearing a prototype. Adam envisions a time when the components of the Dormio will be widely available; anyone will be able to download its blueprint and, with a few cheap premade circuits, construct her own dream incubator.
6. American history in one tragedy
A look at the ripple effects of shootings at a spa in Atlanta.
(Vanity Fair, approx 34 mins reading time)
It wasn’t until six days after the killings that Daoqun read what happened on WeChat. He called his sister Mei and asked her to pick up their mother, Huazhen Zhang, and bring her to him in Zhuhai city, near Macao. Daoqun wanted to protect his mother from the news, at least until he knew more. He went to the local police station, where he was given a phone number for the American embassy in Beijing. A staffer confirmed that the anonymous Chinese woman killed at Young’s Asian Massage was indeed Daoyou Feng.
… AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
In this 2020 essay, Emma Dabiri deconstructs colonial ideas of Blackness, particularly when it comes to hair.
(LitHub, approx 10 mins reading time)
As a black child with tightly coiled hair, growing up in an incredibly white, homogeneous, socially conservative Ireland, I certainly wasn’t considered pretty, but that started to change in my midteens. I remember being told that I was “lucky I was pretty,” which meant I could “almost get away with being black.” However, there remained the unquestioned expectation that certain measures would be taken to keep my affliction at bay. Needless to say, the most offensive manifestations of my threatening blackness had to be rigorously policed.
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