It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective...
There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots:
then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and
you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.
— Karel Čapek, who came up with the concept of robot in Prague pubs, born in 1890
Lecturing About Proust In A Soviet Prison Camp
Jozef Czapski was a Polish officer fighting the Nazis in 1940 when he and his fellows were captured by the Red Army and shipped to a gulag (and thus barely avoiding the Katyn Massacre). To pass the evenings, the officers took turns giving lectures about what they remembered best, and Czapski chose Proust. Here’s why. — The New York Times Book Review
Australia’s tough border security and asylum-seeker regime is again under global scrutiny this week as a British whistleblower and his Russian wife failed in their bid for refugee status. The case is now starting to attract international attention, including from the Kremlin’s number one target, Bill Browder, himself afierce critic of the Putin regime. Dr Martin Hirst reports.
In a statement issued exclusively to us, Bill Browder says
“sending the whistleblower back to face certain danger is an abdication of Australia’s commitment to human rights”.
Nick Stride, British glazier who once worked building a greenhouse for former Russian deputy prime minister and current head of Russia’s largest bank, Igor Shuvalov, is facing deportation from Australia along with his wife, Ludmila Kovaleva and their children
Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century covers what the title promises.
Thirty miles northeast of the Slovakian capital Bratislava is Veľká Mača, a village-turned-bedroom-community of tightly packed bungalows fanning out from a big Catholic church, a small supermarket, and a smoky pub. In winter, the surrounding fields are dusted with snow, some planted with wheat but many now filled with hangar-like logistic centers for Amazon, DHL, and other markers of economic change.
Nearly a year ago, hired killers drove into this quiet town, broke into a small prefabricated bungalow, and shot dead two young people: the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, an archaeologist at a local research institute.
Kuciak was investigating the link between senior political leaders and organized crime, and, as police investigations later made plain, this was the payback. In a region where authoritarianism is rising and press freedom is shrinking, the couple’s execution-style killing was seen as a portent of darker days to come, especially in a country long viewed as poorer and more autocratic than many of its better-known neighbors.
How Slovakians Beat the Oligarchs NYRB
The Game Of Pseudo-Authenticity. “We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases. One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominant and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.”
The Game Of Pseudo-Authenticity. “We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases. One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominant and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.”
