Amid speculation the Russian dictator has gone off the rails, a longtime observer suggests Vlad is the same vicious risk-taker he's always been.
Even among the experts, Russia's invasion of Ukraine came as a surprise. Vladimir Putin seemed to be getting a lot of what he wanted out of the situation, like breaking off the eastern territories of the Donbas, without crossing the border—and with it, what turned out to be a major line in contemporary geopolitics. It was such a clear mistake so early on that some began to speculate that he was losing it a bit, that a man who for so long had operated on cool—if often barbaric—calculation was now behaving rashly on the world stage. As his forces began shelling a nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, the chatter only grew that maybe the guy who controls nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads had gone a bit sideways. If you ask Dr. Kenneth Dekleva, though, there's a simpler explanation: Putin got some bad intel and is paying the price. Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance—which sank in 1915, so beginning the now notorious tale of his crew's survival—was just discovered in the Antarctic. As a major American tennis tournament looms on the horizon, so does the Djokovic debate, ready to suck up all the air. A small but significant cadre of novelists are migrating to Substack, the publishing platform best known as a newsletter distribution tool for journalists. There, titans of contemporary literature like George Saunders, Salman Rushdie, and Chuck Palahniuk are serializing fiction, teaching the craft of writing, and yes, believe it or not, wading into the comments section. Many months into the experiment, they've amassed thousands of subscribers, deepened their dialogue with readers, and built the digital enclaves we all dream of: positive, vibrant, teeming with good faith discourse. But as these novelists light the way for what a safe, congenial online community can look like, they raise questions about their beleaguered platform, and about what it will take to build the digital world we all want to live in. The ultimate guide to all things outerwear. You can take up to 30% off the top three speaker brands—Bose, JBL, and Sony—right now. Anthony Mangieri went back to Jersey and planned on staying there for good. It was 2019. The year before, the latest incarnation of his seminal Una Pizza Napoletana had opened on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to much fanfare, but was ultimately panned. Struggling to pay the rent, noose around his neck, Mangieri zeroed in on a space with big hydraulic windows near the ocean in Point Pleasant, the area where more than three decades earlier he had decided to devote his life to dough, a young kid with limited social skills and, in retrospect, all the makings of an Italian-American shokunin. |
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