This week the news seemed scattered to me: Lots of things are happening, but I’m not able to fit them together into some larger narrative. So this week I’ll post a lot of short notes rather than a long featured post.
Standing in for a featured post are all the notes I have about the war in Ukraine, which is happening on multiple fronts: the military fronts in Ukraine itself, but also the economic front in Russia, and the information/disinformation fronts around the world. That post should be out between 9 and 10 EST.
The weekly summary has a lot else to cover: Biden’s first State of the Union address, the anti-gay and anti-trans laws being pushed in various red states, the continuing effort to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, the racism Judge Jackson is going to have to overcome to make it to the Supreme Court, and a number of other things. That should be out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Hi Doug,
I never do this and it seems on the one hand like something of an overreach, but nonetheless I’d like to suggest a topic for next week’s featured post. I have been struggling to understand more precisely what the version of reality is that makes many Russians support Putin’s war. What I’ve heard is words like “denazification”, which make it sound absurd out of context, and maybe it really is absurd, but there has been very little good reporting to explain what the grain of truth is that makes it not sound absurd to Putin’s followers. For instance, through a conservative friend-of-FB-friend, I recently heard for the first time of the “Azov Battalion”, which (if we are to believe Wikipedia) appears to be a real-life neonazi boogeyman that fights on behalf of Ukraine against Russia, and I don’t have enough information to figure out how significant things like this really are in the big picture. I also find it defensible that Western media don’t want to spend too much time on stuff like that, because it seems almost certain to get abused for Putin’s propaganda, but personally I’d rather be able to see something resembling the whole picture, as without it I can’t even judge accurately how distorted Putin’s picture is. (And unfortunately I have a job that prevents me from spending enough time to piece the whole picture together… but that’s where you come in! :))