Ukraine
The body in the crushed roses
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Excerpt from Sergei Lebedev’s new novel The Lady of the Mine (2025), set near a Ukrainian coal mine that buries atrocities from the past.
Moscow on the Med
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Two winters in Istanbul. If you are a holder of a Russian passport, there are few places in the Western hemisphere that you can go without a visa.
Flags & bones
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On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
Of human children & language children
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The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
No pity
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The documentary When spring came to Bucha reaches beyond common representations of war and one-dimensional victimhood.
Planes, tanks & automobiles
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You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
The prodigal half-rooster
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Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Lea Ypi’s Free spoke past one another from half a world away. But both ask whether freedoms mean anything if they are not practiced in public, and if they are not passed on — and whether the word « freedom » means anything at all.
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow
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Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.