The Ukrainian city of Izyum was occupied by Russian forces for 162 days. In that time, many residents, especially ones whose occupations, skills, or assets made them useful to the Russians, faced one difficult choice after another as they struggled to survive. When the Ukrainian military retook Izyum, the city was confronted with a new dilemma: determining who had “collaborated” with the Russians and should be punished accordingly:
In Kharkiv, the capital of the region, I met with Andriy Kravchenko, a prosecutor who works with Ukraine’s security service, the S.B.U., in identifying and charging suspected collaborators in newly liberated territories. He walked me through the Ukrainian criminal code for Article 111(1), the law governing collaboration, which Zelensky enacted in mid-March. “In general, collaboration is defined as any purposeful act that harms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state,” Kravchenko said.
In practice, that can mean many things. The most obvious cases are those in which a person took up arms against Ukrainian forces or was involved in spying or sabotage to aid the Russian war effort. But assessing culpability can get murky at the level of local governance. “We’re looking for people who worked for the benefit of the Russian occupation,” Kravchenko told me. “But does that apply to a welder or carpenter who maintained buildings or equipment for the occupiers? Or people responsible for critical infrastructure?” There wasn’t an easy answer or policy, he said.
A further complication embedded in Ukraine’s law on collaboration is the question of motive. “Was a person moved to act out of personal belief or under the barrel of a gun?” Kravchenko said. “The first would be a crime, the second not.” In Izyum, government workers stopped receiving their Ukrainian salaries in March. Those who agreed to work for the Russian-backed administration often point to the unforgiving financial reality of occupation. “We have so many of these borderline situations, where it is hard for an investigator to prove not merely collaboration but criminal collaboration,” Kravchenko said. “It requires painstaking work.” He told me that it will likely take years for all the trials stemming from months of occupation to make their way through the courts. “But, believe me,” he added, “every case will be looked into. No one should sleep too comfortably.”
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Telegram, the messaging app created by Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, is said to be private and secure. So why does the Russian government seem to be able to read anything people share on it? At Wired, Darren Loucaides investigates.
Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping.
When Telegram emerged as one of the last remaining oases of information and discussion for Russians, it also became a kind of funnel for Kremlin agents. Agora’s Seleznev believes that Telegram’s API allows investigators to monitor public groups at a large scale and then zero in on potential suspects, who can subsequently be pursued into private channels by undercover agents—or perhaps via a court order to Telegram.
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The running industry is booming, and it seems like these days, running 26.2 miles is no big deal. The number of people running ultra-marathons has nearly quadrupled in the past decade, so for some competitors, even these longer-distance races aren’t challenging enough. For Experience, Brown reports on the rise of quirky and extreme running trends, and how some people, looking to stand out or do something different, find their niche. Beekeeper Farai Chinomwe runs backwards. Moshe Lederfien races while balancing a pineapple on his head. “The motives of these chain-smoking, backwards-moving, produce-aisle-masquerading runners are diverse,” writes Brown, “but weird running’s raisons d’ȇtre tend to exist at the intersection of personal growth and public spectacle.” This is a light and breezy read on how runners up their game and transform the act of running into something else entirely.
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A devastating e-bike tragedy. Children fired out of cannons. The media circus surrounding George Santos. A psychology professor studying the science of awe. And a deep dive into a beloved (and dirty) Peanuts character.
Peter Flax | Bicycling Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 8,136 words
Exactly two years ago, 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir got onto an e-bike with her best friend, crashed, and died. I remember when it happened — the tragedy was covered widely, in no small part because Molly’s mom took to social media to talk about it. Now, in a moving and nuanced feature, Peter Flax examines the question of who, if anyone, is liable for Molly’s death. Flax, who owns two bikes made by the manufacturer of the one Molly rode, a company her parents are now suing, illuminates how the explosive growth of the e-bike industry, while a seeming net good for people and the planet, isn’t without dangerous consequences. There aren’t a lot of industry regulations, and there are pressing concerns about the quality of popular equipment. “As a country we have decided we value entrepreneurship and business and letting people just go to market,” Molly’s mom, Kaye, tells Flax, “and then we find out if the thing is safe or not as it is sold and marketed and used.” This is one of my favorite kinds of magazine feature, the personal story that serves as a lens for a bigger one, which in turn asks people to wrestle with urgent questions. Molly is gone, but her death may well save another 12-year-old girl somewhere. —SD
Abigail Edge | Narratively | January 9, 2023 | 6,964 words
I was a child who had to endure being padded up to the hilt and a safety lecture just to get on a bike. So this story, about a family who happily fired their children out of cannons (starting around the ripe old age of 14), left me agog. An insight into a different world, it is a delightful read about what happens if you actually do run away with the circus. David Smith was 27 when he and his wife, Jean, joined a traveling circus — a surprising career move for a maths teacher. After a stint as a trapeze artist, where he would catch his wife as she hurtled through the air, he found cannon life and never looked back, continuing to be fired over 100 feet into his 70s. The couple’s children grew up immersed in circus culture, seeing it change over the years as circuses fell out of favor; David’s son, David Jr., is still being fired out of cannons today. Pragmatically told, this is a measured take on an extraordinary family. —CW
Jesús A. Rodríguez | Politico Magazine | January 31, 2023 | 4,248 words
Okay, so Politico doesn’t believe in Oxford commas. Demerit issued. But look past that, because Jesús Rodríguez turns on the gas for this scrum’s-eye view of what it’s like to have to cover George Santos, a man whose unrelenting mendacity is shocking even by Congressional standards. If Frank Sinatra had a cold, Santos has an allergy to anything resembling virtue. But he does have the feeble bribery of a box of donuts, which he leaves outside his office for the frustrated journalists — and the last of those donuts provides the apt (if obvious) literary device that fuels the piece. Empty calories, with a core of emptiness at its center: Is there a better culinary symbol for a man like this? Rodríguez knows you know the answer, so he just lets the question sit as he chases Santos around the Capitol and surrounding offices, chronicling every platitude, snipe, and muttered aside along the way. This may be a piece about an elected official, but to call it political journalism does it a disservice. Sometimes you need to laugh to keep from crying, so enjoy the punchlines while you can. —PR
Henry Wismayer | Noema | January 5, 2023 | 6,377 words
“To experience awe, to fully open ourselves up to it,” writes Henry Wismayer, “helps us to live happier, healthier lives.” But what is awe? How has the human sense of wonder over the centuries driven us toward various pursuits and ways of being? Wismayer spends time with Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley professor at the forefront of a scientific movement examining our least-understood emotional state. I’ve appreciated Wismayer’s recent contemplative essays on other subjects, like travel and tourism, and this hybrid of profile and reported essay is yet another thought-provoking read. It’s informative about this new field of psychology but not at all dense, and I came away from it fresh, open-minded, and ready to experience the small wonders of my day. —CLR
Elif Batuman | Astra Magazine | October 27, 2022 | 2,245 words
I’m still sad that Astra Magazine is no more. Maybe it’s because I’m seeing so much fervor for bot-written text lately (oh hi, ChatGPT) and I worry about its mind-boggling potential to pollute the internet with pap left unchecked, not to mention the repercussions of inevitable misuse. Thankfully Astra remains online for now, which allows you to read Elif Batuman’s terrific deep dive on the Peanuts character Pig-Pen. Through Pig-Pen, Batuman explores what Charles Schultz had to say about American values in the 1950s and beyond, most notably, commentary on the darker side of society and relationships. But, in wearing his messiness with pride, is Pig-Pen perhaps the most authentic Peanut of all? “Everyone, it turns out, has a Dirty version of themselves: mussed, unkempt, scribbled over. This feels true.” —KS
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Armed with a handy metaphor, Jesús Rodriguez braves the misery that is The Scrum Waiting Outside George Santos’ Office — and comes out with a gonzo-lite chronicle of futility and fuckery. Just burn it all to the ground, please.
But consider this last remaining donut. Deconstruct it, for a second, from the outside in. The glaze: a gooey, cloudy substance that varnishes the ring of cake, pure glucose soon to strike the palate. Then, the cake itself: yeast and enriched wheat flour and palm oil and more sugar, congealing and forcing one’s salivary glands to go into overdrive. Thirty-three grams of carbohydrates that fuel a sugar rush but leave your hunger totally unsated. At the literal center of it, a hole — emptiness.
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Is finding closure via grueling through-hike a new idea? Not even a little bit. But that doesn’t mean that Gunnar Lundberg’s account of remembrance and renewal isn’t a compelling read. It might just make you want to grab a map and some moleskin.
For me, to “finish” grieving meant making a choice. So many of my choices since his death were rooted in penance and shame: guilt for planning our hiking trip to Isle Royale, for swimming in Temperance River, for not jumping back in. Finishing grieving meant finally choosing to forgive myself and to celebrate, rather than mourn, his life. Those 144 days taught me to carry only the things I needed most and to leave behind what weighed me down.
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It’s only recently that I’ve started to read and become a lot more interested in literature in translation. To be completely trite, a whole new world has opened up for me. That’s why I was drawn to Wei Ting’s piece at Electric Lit in which she explores a little of the history of Eastern translation, looks at the differences between Eastern and Western children’s lit, and advocates for more books to be translated, so that we as readers can understand the world and others just a little bit better.
Translation holds a particular and peculiar power. It is how we come to understand the world outside our own; that is, the world that exists outside of our own language. The Latin root word for translation comes from latus, the past participle of ferre or “to carry”; in Teju Cole’s beautiful metaphor, the translator is a ferry operator, carrying words from one shore to the other. To take this metaphor further: if the translator is the ferry operator, language is a current.
Soon after I gave birth, my writer friends arrived at my house with piles of classic English picture books. Determined to have my children rooted in their own culture, I set out to find children’s books with characters that not only looked like them, but stories that would help them navigate the complex world they will inherit. Just by the act of searching, I came to read wonderful writers from Japan, South Korea, and China with a completely different sensibility from Western children’s literature.
Reading children’s literature again as an adult, the difference between Western and East Asian stories was startling: Western children’s books are often centered on the individual’s journey, while stories by Chinese, Japanese and Korean authors emphasize respecting other people’s feelings, patience, and acceptance. As a child, I found many of these old Chinese stories moralistic and preachy. But to my surprise, I also discovered many wonderful children’s books which conveyed these same values without being didactic, and helped me as a mother understand my own feelings and moderate my response towards my child’s behavior.
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