Tag: last name
How I Lost the Russia That Never Was
The lack of respect for the dead surprised even a soldier with the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary legion of former convicts that fought some of the bloodiest battles in the invasion of Ukraine. He looked at an ugly heap of wooden crosses and flower wreaths that had been pushed aside and cursed the authorities.
“What are you doing? They died for Russia, and you are razing their graves to the ground. You are rolling over them,” he said in
The Monk Who Thinks the World Is Ending
The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.
Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago,
Sharon McMahon Has No Use for Rage-Baiting
The Instagram influencer’s workshop on abortion was not meant to persuade anyone. But by the end of the 2,000-person, five-hour Zoom history lesson, at least a few attendees were thinking differently about one of the most fraught topics in American politics. “I personally believe in the sacredness of life,” Shelley Smith, a conservative participant from California, told me afterward. But “something that was important for me to learn was [that] my personal beliefs shouldn’t trump someone else’s body autonomy.”
The Casteism I See in America
Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects—and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence,
A Eulogy for the Free Press in Hong Kong
On the morning of July 1, 2020, newsstands across Hong Kong had a conspicuously uniform appearance. At least eight major papers carried identical front-page advertisements: a cerulean-shaded photo of uniformed officials standing below the Chinese and Hong Kong flags with the city’s harbor in the background. The image was overlaid with lines of white text triumphantly welcoming the arrival of a sweeping national-security law enacted the night before. Just one paper looked different, breaking from the monotonous propaganda. Apple Daily