The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
Over the past three years, I’ve written more than once about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine: Will there be war? (December 2018); A test of American resolve (April 2021); Operation Eviction (January 2022). Also, this comment on Tyler Cowen’s…
Here’s a video of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá – its youth section mostly – performing Janáček‘s Cunning Little Vixen in August 2021. The staging is as simple and low-budget as they go. I would call it home-made, but –…
In a recent NYT column, Fiona Hill gave a convincing summary of the Kremlin’s strategy: This time, Mr. Putin’s aim is bigger than closing NATO’s “open door” to Ukraine and taking more territory — he wants to evict the United…
Tyler Cowen wrote in his Bloomberg column last week: Two questions are of particular concern: Is he [Putin] rational? And can he be deterred? …The answers, unfortunately, are: Yes and no. That is, he is probably rational and cannot easily…
The opening sentence of a recent piece by Laura Spinney in The Guardian: Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Newton’s second law of motion is F…
Here’s Reuters reporting on the crisis in Kazakhstan: Washington has challenged the justification for sending Russian troops to Kazakhstan and questioned whether what has been billed as a mission of days or weeks could turn into a much longer presence.…
It’s been a bad year for all decent Russians. As the country continues its long descent into existential misery, the ugliness of its political regime contrasts remarkably with the charms of the winter season. Unusually for this millennium, December has…
In lieu of a post, two photographs for last summer’s trip. The big fish is in both pictures but it may take time to find it behind the leaves and branches on the left.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Spanish, brea means tar or pitch. Confusingly, the Spanish definition provided alongside the English translation is “sustancia resinosa de ciertas coníferas.” Roughly, “the resinous substance of certain coniferous plants,” which sounds more like resin…
Fiona Hill’s new book, There Is Nothing for You Here, went on sale last week – five and a half years after Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin had been published (co-authored with Clifford Gaddy). Hill served as the national…
Maria Ressa, an investigative journalist from the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, have been jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. AP comments: Considering how critical Novaya Gazeta has been toward Putin and his government, Peskov’s [Putin’s…
I was trying to write a sensible comment to a piece on Medium, It’s Time We Tell the Truth about the Rolling Stones, when I came across a stunning essay by Margo Jefferson. Ripping Off Black Music, published in 1973…