(My Daybook page 2022)

I am in the process of scanning and preparing some of my older daybook pages for publication as part of a selection of my war journals.

It is an exciting project and I am looking forward to my friends and colleagues having a chance to see some of my private diary entries and journals from high points during the war.

Promise…. Promise that I will write more about this collection of war diaries and drawings, paintings and collages in due time.

However, upon opening one I discovered a minor desecration and aesthetic miracle in one of my daybooks from 2022.

A flower that I had picked in Eastern Europe and pressed into the journal had turned out to have a rather malignant heart and spirit.

In fact- it was poisonous, and had begun decaying in the most bilious spirit….

(I shall mercifully spare you the more obvious and glib jokes about the flowering of Eastern European comrades…) The flower’s poisonous and rotten nature transposed itself upon the pages and it ate through half a dozen pages. It masticated the thick cardboard paper in both directions from the center of the daybook.

The effect turned out to be quite striking.

The 2026 Venice Biennial is coming to an end- and I will swing by to see it before it closes in a month. In that same daybook from 2022 -

I found some pages from the 2022 Biennial.

One of these was of me in front of a large statue of a tongue.

Some of my friends were quite happy to see an image of my tongue plucked from my mouth….

I am also including a poem I wrote in Venice at that time which will be included in a forthcoming book of my poems:


Venice Vaporetto Sign Typography

  Venice, Italy

    La Serenissima
      the cream of the driftwood 
    a worthy adoxography
  lilting from the lagoon
   expergefaction to the eddy
 l’aporia è la difficoltà irrisolvibile
    a worthy adoxography
      for your jaculiferous trinkets -
     sallow sourcing 
    in the aggregate
       paddle across the eddy
   ferruginous passagio 
    impraticabile toil
 buoyant brontide tide, 
   lapping at 
      intimations of buoyancy 
  prohibited on dock, 
         schema
      hull integrity is fatal
    selcouth moments are prohibited 
   against the light 
 in the tilted jetty 
  negligible 
      my uliginousness sifting
    engorged through the bog
   expergefaction to the tide 
 l'aporia è la difficoltà irrisolvibile

(My Daybook Page -Sept 22, 2026 - Razom for Ukraine “Bring the kids back” teddy bear art instillation- my collage over the protest flyer).

Now, I may be biased dear readers, but do hear me out!…

I consider the Ukrainian Museum in the East Village to be a MOST lovely and exquisitely important New York cultural institution.

Well, I suppose my opinion is not that surprising.

Almost a year ago, the museum appointed my friend Elena Siyanko as its new Director. Siyanko has brought flair, energy, elegance and erudition to the role - and the Museum has bloomed with revitalized energy.

The quality of the programming has improved a great deal and a host of new projects are in the works. The museum has competing mandates in bringing modern Ukrainian culture to New York City while also continuing to serve up more traditional cultural offerings to the American-born Ukrainian diaspora whose artistic tastes skew somewhat more conservative.

The East Village institution is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary with multiple new exhibitions and events. I highly recommend joining us for some of these… As well as the fundraising gala to be held on November 8th. That promises to be a rollicking time.

The main exhibition currently up is “A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50” - a feisty, colorful and dazzling curation of the Museum’s holdings across artistic styles and epochs.

The museum is also currently hosting the first North American museum exhibition of the Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova. Which is a great choice - even if it is not a full on retrospective of her work that New York badly needs!

Zhanna Kadyrova’s celebrated Palianytsia series is composed of rounded river stones sourced in the Carpathian Mountains. Kadyrova has carved them to resemble the eponymous bread loaves.

The table of stone sculptures can be seen from the vitrine of the museum.

The entrance to the Museum has also been recently redone with a fetching stain glass like collage of the works it owns. Here is Director Siyanko telling me about the new additions:

Speaking of truly excellent recent cultural appointments - the (often) benighted PEN America announced that Phil Klay, novelist, essayist, and professor of literature and creative writing, will serve as its next president and chair of the Board of Trustees. This is remarkably good news, and I could not be more delighted. I honestly would not have thought that PEN America was salvageable after a decade of divisive (and truly disappointing) scandals. Klay is a deeply compelling choice for the position. In fact I am deeply surprised that something this positive could even happen. When I congratulated him, I texted Klay that I would even finally join the organization (I previously refused to do so)!

Klay co-hosts the excellent Manifesto! podcast with my old pal and Tablet colleague Jacob Siegel.

For those who may have missed it - I was on the podcast earlier this year in order to discuss Ukrainian poetry and Malevich…..

https://manifesto.fireside.fm/88

Congratulations to Phil!

Perhaps freedom of speech and thought in America will live on to fight another day!

The debased annual circus that is the United Nations General Assembly has rolled into my hometown.

As ever, much of what transpired was preening, self-congratulatory and grotesque and ridiculous and nasty beyond belief. The Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif crowed comically about Pakistan’s “great sacrifice” in protecting London and New York City from terrorist attacks(!)

One need not be an Indian diplomat to find that sentiment hilarious - (I am not an Indian) - but the Indians took the opportunity to initiate a diplomatic brawl.

Other acts of trolling were much less amusing however.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov triumphantly presented the UN’s Secretary-General, António Guterres, with the Russian propaganda report “falsification of events in Bucha” - that is, denying Russian culpability for the war crimes that were committed by Russian troops during the first days of the full-scale invasion.

In related UN street fighting news: my man Zelensky was ambushed in the middle of the New York City by Russian journalists. They demanded to known when he intended to fly to Moscow for direct negotiations.

Zelensky flippantly informed the Russians that he would be flying into Moscow on a missile!

Zelensky also met with Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa (for the second time) at the sidelines of the gathering. Once again, I was struck by how much the two men resemble cousins. Which of course they are.

In Middle Eastern-Ukrainian news - the Ukrainian Africacorps now seems to be operating in Libya!

Along with all the antecedent tomfoolery and schmoozing, I dutifully attended some of the General Assembly week events and parties and conferences. However, the most memorable and touching event of the week was decidedly non-official and took place outside of Manhattan.

(My daybook page -September 22, 2026 -New York, Long Island City -Razom for Ukraine art instillation)

The good and noble people over at the American Coalition for Ukraine and Razom for Ukraine have created a deeply affecting mobile art installation composed of 20,000 teddy bears.

Each bear attached to the chain-link fence symbolizes a single Ukrainian child abducted by the Russian army- though the actual number of stolen Ukrainian children is almost certainly much, much, much greater. The true scale of the kidnapping of Ukrainian children is likely harrowing compared to what we currently know.

It is simply very hard to catalogue the full scale of horrors taking place in the occupied Ukrainian territories.

The installation is composed of 15 interconnected panels and took three days to be assembled by volunteers.

The Razom fence had first been installed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this April - it was unveiled this past week in NYC, along the Long Island City waterfront. That is in full view of the United Nations building. Even as the Presidents, Diplomats and assorted hangers across the river likely took little notice.

Behind the fence, US Coast Guard attack boats with heavy machine guns mounted on their decks, patrolled the waters of the river beneath the installation. Men and women out for their afternoon walk explained the bears to their young children.

(Razom’s Nastya Rab, Canadian activist Ivanka Stolkowsky, Meghan Mobbs and yours truly at the rally).

The indomitable Meghan Mobbs delivered impassioned remarks at the ceremony and rally. Mobbs is the daughter of General Kellogg - Trump’s previous Ukraine envoy. She is a pivotal and powerful ally of Ukraine. She stridently denounced the United Nations as an out-of-date Cold War relic in which powers such as Russia and China- who are by any standards the most serious mass human-rights violators of our time- continue to wield veto powers inside the outmoded institution. Over the last few years, the Ukrainians have had to learn hard lessons about the character of the UN- the hard way- that the Jews and Persians have known for decades.

Mobbs has been denouncing the UN for what it manifestly is- a cold war relic institution that is no longer for purpose. The speech was pitch-perfect and every word needs to be listened to… but here is her conclusion:

“The evidence has been collected, the reports have been written, the resolutions have been passed, the speeches have been given, and the children are still gone. So today I say, spare me another resolution! Spare me another carefully worded statement of grave concern. Spare me another week in New York where dictators and diplomats clog the streets, give speeches about international law, congratulate one another at cocktail parties, and then go home, while Ukrainian parents go another night without their children. And what exactly is the United Nations for? If you can document the theft of children but cannot compel their return, if you can identify crimes against humanity but cannot impose consequence, if the aggressor can violate the UN Charter, steal another nation’s children, attempt to erase their identity, and then take its seat on the Security Council, then perhaps the problem is not that the United Nations needs another resolution. Perhaps the problem is that the United Nations has become very good at documenting evil and remarkably useless at stopping it. And history will not judge this institution by the eloquence of its resolutions. History will ask a much simpler question: You knew children were being stolen- what did you do about it?

These children are not statistics -they’re not diplomatic leverage, they’re not negotiating chips, and they sure as hell are not Russian citizens. They are Ukrainian children, stolen from their parents, their history, and their homes. Russia knows it, the United Nations knows it, and knowing without acting is not an excuse. ——-it is an indictment of the entire body.

These stolen children…. We must bring them home.”

(Collage painting from my Daybook 2025)

New York City

Today, dear friends is Yom Kippur for us - le peuple israélite…. the day of atonement.

I do fast - but neglect to turn off my phone and computer.

I should admit that I have lived an irreverent, brash, intense, louche, and - yes, it is true- occasionally sinful life……

So: If I have hurt any of you this past year, and you are not a Russian soldier or officer rampaging and violating you way through Ukraine, please do forgive me.

If however you do meet that second requirement... I did indeed intend to hurt you.

Still, I should admit that I cannot stop being an irreverent bad boy even after services…

Tonight, I cavalierly informed some annoyingly officious Russians I was speaking with at the Manhattan Synagogue that I would not be unhappy if the Ukrainian armed forces annihilated Moscow in response for its crimes. I allowed however that St. Petersburg might be spared because of its historical beauty.

Which I do believe clearly indicates that I took the Rabbi’s sermon on genteel forgiveness seriously!

A Russian woman scowled at me and told me that I have a very “black and white view of things and that I am happy you are not in charge of anything.”

I informed her that the people in charge of these matters do not disagree with me.

In all seriousness- if I have insulted you and you also did not deserve it- please do forgive me!

(My daybook page 2024)

Speaking of Ukrainian vengeance-

Kyiv has delivered a devastating set of hits against Moscow Oil Refineries today. The Ukrainians used domestically produced long range weapon systems and launched them on the day of atonement against the Russian Oil infrastructure (the Kapotyna Moscow Refinery is located approximately 10 miles from the Kremlin. The Russians themselves have described the assault as “the largest drone attack on the Russian capital to date”. The Ukrainians can now hit basically any target they want inside of Russia without using Western made missile technology.

The successful Ukrainian attack came half a day after devastating Russian ballistic missile strikes knocked out Ukraine's last three major metallurgical plants. Ukraine lost around ninety percent of its domestic steel production in a single night. Both sides have switched their attack patterns toward knocking out the other side’s capacity to maintain a war time economy.

According to the Kyiv Post: “In early September, coordinated ballistic barrages disabled blast furnaces across three major plants, killing 17 metallurgical workers. Subsequent strikes have systematically targeted the damaged facilities to prevent repair efforts, including a dawn attack on Thursday, Sept. 17, when two Russian ballistic missiles struck the Zaporizhstal metallurgical complex in Zaporizhzhia, marking the fourth missile strike on that facility in five weeks.

Also - do forgive the comparatively low level of sarcasm- but I personally can’t wait for all the articles about the Russian parliamentary elections that we will be seeing over the next few days.

The Odessa ports have now been (totally) out of commission for two months now.

(Daybook Page from Odessa in 2024) - I went to the museum in the summer of 2024…. back when the port was still operational)

Read more

(My daybook page while riding a Ukrainian Train last year between Kyiv and Poland).

So, Comrades: Two days ago, just as the annual Yalta European Strategy conference was winding down in Kyiv, the Russians decided to probe the Western world with escalation. Their cynical target of choice was the European and American diplomatic delegations visiting the city. Men and women who were brave enough to face the content boring in order to visit Ukraine during wartime.

I was on Matt Gaetz’s show again yesterday to discuss the Russian targeting of trains full of Western journalists, diplomats, Prime Ministers, and former CIA Director David Petraeus (!) as they were leaving Ukrainian Businessman Viktor Pinchuk’s extravagant annual bash.

As I skipped the conference this year, I had an acute sense of FOMO and quipped to Gaetz: “I missed all the fun with the train bombing ——all of my friends got bombed and I didn’t!”

Gaetz could barely contain his smirk.

Here is the longer version of the debate, during which I engaged intensely with a pro-Russian journalist who was reciting absurd Kremlin propaganda talking points in a thoroughly cavalier manner. The debate quickly devolved into a swashbuckling knife fight. At one point upon being asked “how we are doing” I retorted to Gaetz “who are we comrade?”…. I was forced to disabuse my opponent of the ridiculous and false notion that Ukraine was the one deliberately targeting civilians. He was spouting so much nonsense that I hardly knew where to begin.

An advanced Russian combat drone slammed into an Ukrzaliznytsia (Ukrainian state rail company) locomotive located roughly a mile and a half from the Polish-Ukrainian border. An insidious taunt and transparent probe by Moscow against NATO’s red lines. The guided drone was jet-propelled, part of an innovative new class of ornithopter war machines that have recently been deployed. This aerial strike against civilian rail infrastructure took place at the same time that a chartered train full of high-profile European and American delegates was leaving the country. Esteemed passengers on the night train from Kyiv included former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, and a panoply of European security officials, generals, and diplomats. Former CIA Director David Petraeus was traveling on a separate train. For the record -in my own personal conversations with Petraeus at that same conference, he demonstrated the practiced respectful manners that the American military drills into its flag officers.

To repeat this remarkable fact: a Russian drone attack took place a mile and a half away from the location of a former CIA Director!

The Free Press ran an essay on what transpired at the train station at Yahodyn.

The historian Niall Ferguson - a perennial conference fixture whom I befriended several years ago in Kyiv and who happens to be a fantastic and remarkably fun fellow- texted me from Poland: “I assume that they only intended to scare us. Only Boris and the other grandees who had their own security details even knew about what was happening before we arrived in Poland.”

Incidentally, I had caught up with Niall in London just days earlier at Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book publication party (more on that later this week), where he offered hysterically dry dating advice. I filled him in on my remarkably doomed, romantic, and intense ongoing love affair with a high profile and glamorous Kyrgyz artist.

“What would you do in this situation?” I pleaded, seeking wise (and historically informed) counsel from one of the great historians of the age.

Ferguson rightly pointed out that I enjoy living dangerously. He sagely suggested that I should “find yourself a nice Somali girl living under a fatwa.”

Anyway, the calculated Russian attack against the Ukrainian train took place several days after the arrival of the Trump administration peace envoys Messrs. Witkoff and Kushner from the Polish border. The novice diplomats, too, had been forced to take the diplomatic train over the Polish border. The Russians had bombed both of Kyiv’s international airports so that Witkoff and Kushner could not land directly in the Ukrainian capital after their diplomatic visit to Moscow. This had been their first trip to Kyiv to meet with President Zelensky directly, despite having already made eight or nine journeys to Moscow for direct bilateral negotiations with Putin.

Bombing the airports was an absolutely typical act of juvenile Putinist trolling: undeniably funny, brutal, vulgar and unmistakably signaling the depth of the Kremlin’s disdain for the American envoys and their totally hopeless assignment.

(My picture of New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman arguing with Gogol Bordello singer and frontman Eugene Hütz! The WSJ’s Yaroslav Trofimov in the background)

As I (ruefully) mentioned on air during my Matt Gaetz show appearance, I had to skip this year’s YES Yalta Conference. I have attended eight times over the last eleven years and some of those trips were genuinely unforgettable.

A fond memory.

At the 2023 conference, I found myself facilitating a surreal meeting of the minds when I introduced New York Times columnist Thomas “six more months” Friedman to Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz.

The wild Kyiv native Hütz had emerged as a global ambassador for the Ukrainian cause after the start of the full-scale invasion. He was performing at the conference that year and I had not seen or spoken with him in nearly fifteen years. Not since the debauched nights of my misspent youth.

Nights spent dancing away the ill humors at the old Bulgarian Bar on Canal Street.

A twenty-year-old version of me can even be seen making a cameo dancing with my Polish-American college girlfriend in the grainy music video for Start Wearing Purple ….at the 40-second mark:

My New Yorker credits are totally impeccable.

Naturally, it was difficult to resist needling the officious Friedman.

I inquired what he had heard of the front line situation from his taxi driver on the ride into the city.

The gentleman took immediate and totally absurd offense to what was admittedly a blandly lame joke. Surely I could not have been the first to ask Thomas Friedman what he had learned on the taxi ride..... He began to furiously insist that he had never interviewed a taxi driver in his entire (ENTIRE) career and told me that I could and should publicly quote him on that! With the mood thoroughly soured, the teenage prankster in me lost the chance to ask the obvious follow-up: what would the Ukraine- Russia war look like in six months?

I quickly pivoted and introduced him to Hütz.

Hütz pointed at me and casually informed the New York Times columnist that I had been totally and utterly insufferable in my early twenties and that he was amazed to see me all these years later. Also -it was amazing that I’d amounted to anything at all!

The two immediately launched into a discussion on foreign policy.

So a modest proposal to the editors of the paper of record…

Thomas Friedman has been writing for the op-ed section for far too long-

why not replace him with a puckish Ukrainian-American bad boy?

If not me, then perhaps a practitioner of Gypsy Punk cabaret?

(My Daybook Pages from Milan at Anselm Kiefer Alchemists exhibition at the Palazzo Reale)

It was a very brief layover in Milan.

Without delving into tedious details, the return trip to New York City from Central Asia had been horrific; enervated and exhausted, I had not slept in three nights.

Whatever security services had stolen my passport in Bishkek (“you got lazy with your tradecraft bro” at least half my friends reprimanded me).

Flamboyant behavior often bears high costs. Having fun is often very expensive.

I was forced to procure an emergency purple American passport from the very efficient and kind professionals at the American Embassy in the Kyrgyz Capital. On the layover in Dubai, it was (not so politely) explained to me that UAE does not allow in Emergency Passport holders.

My insistent argument that “I am an American!!!” had no effect on security. Finally the irate and arrogant border guards demanded to know why I kept repeating that I was an American. We know your nationality! he spat at me…. “Because as an American taxpayer” I riposted “I pay for the Patriot missiles that protect this airport from Iranian missiles!”

I do adore winning an argument and the haughty Arab border guard did shut up - but my iron clad argument failed to defeat UAE border policies. I was forced to endure a day at the Dubai airport. Forced to miss my meetings and wait for the 4 am flight to Italy.

(Anselm Kiefer Alchemists exhibition at the Palazzo Reale - my photo)

Thus… I was near physical collapse upon arriving in Milan.

Naturally, dear readers, I could not countenance myself, so I dashed madly from the airport into Milan’s city center in order to catch a brief glimpse of the Anselm Kiefer Alchemists exhibition at the Palazzo Reale.

I am an obsessive Kiefer completist, and the week and a half of extreme jet lag that I would countenance for my fetish was (almost) worth it. I imagine this is what a medieval pilgrim felt like upon arriving in Jerusalem after six months on the road.

Though Kiefer's most recent NYC exhibition Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still at Gagosian has now closed, you have three more weeks to see the Italian exhibition dear reader!

The Women Alchemists is a monumental and theatrical Opera set decoration of an exhibition (with the Opera being European history).

The Palazzo’s main dance hall—the Sala delle Cariatidi—was badly damaged by Allied bombing at the conclusion of the war’s Italian campaign. It contains forty severely damaged caryatid columns, their angelic (feminine) faces smashed, brutalized and effaced by the maelstrom that had engulfed the room. The exhibition is a bravado work erected on a massive scale and fashioned with industrial precision by Kiefer’s massive workshop.

More than three dozen paintings -sixteen feet tall and ten feet across -are flecked with gold leaf and fold out like screens. They are dedicated to women practitioners of the alchemical dark arts that were practiced in the run-up to the Scientific Revolution. Like Kiefer, these women alchemists played with arcane dark and light powers. The works insist that they too were artists. Like the broken caryatid’s who hover over them, some were killed by fire- burned at the stake.

Kiefer is master of creating spectacular and grand meditations on history, memory and aesthetics.

He employs hundreds of assistants to help him reach his monumental visions.

The scale and context of these new works will be familiar to anyone who got a chance to see Kiefer’s Venetian show in the Doge’s Palace a few years back.

Kiefer’s fine-tuned melding of the Germano-Austrian strain of brutalist expressionism with the mutilated Italian delicacy of the ballroom is deeply compelling. In her Financial Times essay on the exhibition, art critic Jackie Wullschläger aptly refers to Kiefer as a “potent, violent interloper in the exquisitely proportioned hall.”

She continues:

“In Napoleon’s time, the classical Sala delle Cariatidi was Europe’s largest, most elaborate ballroom, dripping chandeliers. In 1943, British bombs devastated it. Left open to the elements for years afterwards, the Hall was never fully restored, and has survived as a mix of ruin and grandeur: an emblem of suffering, resilience and memory. When I push through the throng around the Duomo — Milan is awash with visitors for the Winter Olympics — and cross the square to enter this fascinating, silent, elegiac room, I am welcomed by 80-year-old Anselm Kiefer. Dressed all in black, lean, agile, eagle-eyed, he is zigzagging between dozens of monumental, freestanding golden depictions of Renaissance women emerging from a churning darkness. They too are multiplied in the mirrors, and also gaze on the solemn caryatids. These figures comprise Le Alchimiste (The Women Alchemists), a stunning exhibition that is the highlight of Milan’s Olympics cultural showcase, a majestic setting still marked by the scars of the 1943 bombing.” Wullschläger wrote in FT.

Incidentally- after seeing the Monet Venice painting exhibition in both of its Brooklyn and San Francisco iteration, I began reading her newly published Monet biography.

In order to achieve the properly mystical state of aesthetic appreciation- I got sloshed on Aperol Spritzes at the Cafe Milano before entering the exhibtion.

I arranged a [painted over] collage of the paintings in my daybook.

The American Artist and alchemy fanatic Ann McCoy also wrote a compelling account of the exhibit in her Brooklyn Rail column:

“If there is a fly in the ointment it is Kiefer’s poorly drawn portraits, some of whom resemble suspended winged bats. The awkward modeling is too brute to portray these mostly gentle women. Figure-drawing is not the artist’s forte, and he is more successful when he uses appliqued nightgowns and collaged photographs as female representations. Still, this exhibition represents a great achievement. As a fifty-year student of alchemy, I was not familiar with many of these women. They often labored in obscurity, using male pseudonyms, only to see their contributions erased for history. Kiefer is to be applauded for bringing them out of obscurity. The world view they represent presents us with a path forward, linking earth to heaven, the natural world to the body, and the microcosm to the macrocosm. This is the time to reincarnate spirit into matter, rediscover feminine achievements, and revive women’s mysteries.”

The visit was certainly an obsessive and spiritual journey for me.

An erotic poem from my forthcoming volume:

Lord Byron’s Great Grand Daughter

My encounter
     with a loud English lass - 
         Lord Byron’s bastard issue
   BRASSY/ BUXOM / CRASS 
your thorned English Rose

     blonde tress-age flowering
wolf grey eyed and plump 
       Junoesque bosom of lilac flesh 
       not heaving exactly 
but a chthonic protruding——-

primed for abasement 
      DRESS / ADDRESS / UNDRESS
     all inroads pleading for provenance
    a shabby London party 
perfumed by tacky desperation

creamed on her linen dress 
      proclaiming declamations of noblesse
    covering for advances of blunt force
    ferment and opulent filth grew from
Lord Byron’s bastard seed!

Bacchus! Where was the good stuff?
     having imbibed too meagerly 
    to accept indelicate offers
       pedigreed favors
from a squalid canonical source

        What history started 
STUTTERED/ SUTTURED/ SLUTTED 
     broken porcelain vessel 
    unviolated fastidious rebuffing 
such [insinuations] grubby favors 

O Byron! slipped the scrimmage
     field fled,  gazed on her slipping into the lav -
      with a boorish and truculent Indian 
observing my decline sprang and wooed 
 set upon pawing her plump waist

      While I considered folly and romance
      covetous shrieks -
confronting contemptible failure - 
       simple lack  
of coital gallantry 

On what other night
   what fool? 
      might [with false restraint] forego the chance to bend 
Lord Byron’s blood and seed 
        across the London bathroom sink?

My daybook for 2025-26

This week, I paid a brief visit to the home of my wealthy relations in Washington D.C. crashing with them while meeting with various sources and contacts in the Trump administration.

I adore them and they adore me and their unremitting generosity and patience toward me includes their graciously agreeing to house my ten-thousand volume library in their sprawling suburban McMansion as I peripatetically wander the world in pursuit of dopamine, beauty, glory and personal entanglements with history.

My aunt - a Japanese style minimalist declutterer - stood with me in front of the piano in the wood-paneled library, which, overstuffed with my books, lent the room a completely different atmosphere from the rest of the house.

As usual during my visit, my aunt gingerly inquired if perhaps I wanted to get rid of some of the older volumes. Thirty- five years after arriving in America, she was finally getting around to discarding the superfluous volumes of her own library - the complete Russian sets of Jack London, Thackeray, and Dostoevsky that she had transported from the Soviet Union to the New World. Who would read these again?

A photo of part of my library

That my parents’ generation touchingly filled their suitcases on emigration with Soviet books is testament to both the horrors of Soviet life and to the middle class culture of the mind that they had developed in place of organized religion.

My aunt and I got into a friendly debate over the provenance and meaning of the books -what they could possibly mean crammed onto groaning shelves in an otherwise sparsely appointed American McMansion (“This house is the size of a Walmart!” as one girlfriend who stayed the night once quipped).

Yes, my aunt agreed with me- some of the volumes might indeed represent personal mementos (maybe we could toss the others?)

Talismanic tokens of a particular time and interest.

Mementos of a particular age and life stage.

One need not necessarily have to touch those books ever again in order to devote care to them -or to honor the singular moment of development that they had once represented in life.

To prove my point, I pulled from the shelf my battered 2011 review copy of Parallel Stories, the 1,150-page masterpiece by the prototypical Hungarian-Jewish postmodernist genius Péter Nádas. FSG had published the three part novel, which he had written over the course of almost twenty years - in a single mammoth brick of an edition in 2011. It was a signal literary event of that autumn and I reviewed the book in The Forward as a fledgling young literary pup in his early twenties. I told her about Nádas and the brief craze for his writing that had overtaken the New York of my youth that autumn. A different time.

My aunt agreed that I should hold on to the beat up volume.

At the exact moment that we were discussing the behemoth Parallel Stories, a sprawling and surrealistic and erotic parable of twentieth century Communism, Nádas was shuffling off this mortal coil in the tiny Hungarian village of Gombosszeg (approximate population of 50- Nádas was known to be a literary recluse).

My aunt and I were holding the book and discussing it at the precise instant he was passing.

It was an unexplainable, unheimlich, intertextual serendipity of history and literary fate entirely out of Nádas's own novels. Nádas would have really liked that moment—akin to one of the surrealistic, humane, and improbable set pieces that propelled the narratives of his books. I also think he would have liked my aunt, a graduate of the Marxism andLeninism MA Program in the Philosophy Department at Moscow State University (MGU) who is now a moderate suburban Republican—even if he might likely have been baffled and charmed by the manner in which his books had found their way to the shelves of a post-Soviet émigré McMansion in the Washington D.C. suburbs.

Parallel Stories is a ravishing and recondite work. As I wrote in my youthful review:

“The “Parallel” stories float, slide and sidestep each other. They clasp and release just as lightly, and they leave most things unresolved, floating away in mists of intimation. The body of an elderly gentleman dead of a heart attack, found on a Berlin park bench at the beginning of the novel, is never identified, though we have an idea who it is by the end of the book. This seriality propels him into what Hungarian critic Gábor Csordás styles “corporeal synecdoche writing” when describing Nádas’s method of providing a “staggering multiplicity of essentially independent stories, which no realist construction would be able to embrace within a single narrative…. Which is as colossally ambitious as and deserves comparison with those of Tolstoy, Balzac, Broch or Mann. Yet here, the narrator of the catholic 19th-century realist novel is pulled down from his celestial heights and swaddled in the fabric of the narrative tapestry. He does not know any more then we do and, indeed, perspective shifts ceaselessly as plots proliferate, tangle and loop back languorously and purposefully. And unlike many maximalist post-modern novels, they entangle without the cluttering effect often wrought by bricolage and the over-accumulation of device.”

Nádas, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize, would publish 1000 page-long essays on the nature of melancholy, which one intelligent expositor declared to be “a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling”. A Jewish Hungarian born in Budapest in the midst of World War, he lost both his mother and father (to suicide) as a teenager. The Soviet Tanks came the next year. His career and life were difficult. The Communist censorship apparatus went at him full force. Success only came late

Nádas certainly had a great deal to be melancholy about.

For my own part, I cannot help but feel a measure of melancholy about the fact that I will never be young enough to have two weeks to devote to devouring a complex 1150 page digressive novel of the wonders and horrors of the twentieth century. It is exceedingly difficult (at least for me personally) to imagine a future where swathes of young people have the time, discipline and sensibility to immerse themselves in that kind of literary experience. I am not sure that I could get my own undergrad students to plow through it even if we devoted an entire semester to a book of that scope and difficulty.

On the other hand, we have seen an explosion of interest in the equally dense (but shorter) novels of László Krasznahorkai since he received the Nobel Prize.

So who knows?

I do look forward to seeing what comes out of the flood of obituaries and encomiums that arrive every time one of the giants passes.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe - a heavyweight/hardline Russia hawk messenger who is trusted by both the Europeans and the Ukrainians -flew directly into Moscow for a high-stakes, tête-à-tête meeting with his counterpart, Russian FSB Director Aleksandr V. Bortnikov. The American military plane flew out of a NATO base in the Baltics (as if to make a point). Ratcliffe does not seem to have met with Putin personally - and Trump seems to have personally deconflicted a request to the Ukrainians to not shoot any drones or missiles at St. Petersburg or Moscow for two days. The official was a very serious diplomatic overture from Washington to Moscow. Deploying Ratcliffe rather than trusted Trump’s Russia envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (who have yet to make a single visit to Kyiv - but that seems to be under negotiation) signaled that the administration intended to ratchet up the scale of its messaging.

The high visibility visit recalled the frenetic, direct visits of Western officials to Moscow in late 2021 and January 2022 in a last minute bid to avert the full-scale Russian invasion. The internet and analytical community buzzed with speculation over what, exactly, Ratcliffe was trying to explain. Or prevent. Was this an escalation of pressure on Moscow from Trump? Secret negotiations designed to bypass Kyiv and European capitals or a desperate effort to head off a crisis that the public yet knew nothing of? One prevailing theory was that Putin, his generals, and his intelligence chiefs were still not receiving accurate battlefield data- European and Ukrainian officials routinely warn that Putin’s inner circle filters intelligence to avoid losing access to him. That theory meant that Putin required a personal corrective directly from the CIA director.

Two days later, the semblance of what transpired is beginning to take shape, even if the core message remains opaque. According to widely reported consensus, Ratcliffe’s primary objective was to hand-deliver the U.S. intelligence community’s grim assessment of Moscow’s stalled grinding military campaign. To deliver a reality check on the actual trajectory of the war - if the Ukrainian drones exploding within earshot of the Kremlin had not already provided one.

Sending Ratcliffe was intended to reassure American allies, who, having been blindsided by diplomatic and military developments in recent months, remain understandably skittish. The trip was coordinated directly with Ukrainian counterparts, who seem to have been proffered serious assurances that nothing would be bargained away behind Kyiv’s back. Ratcliffe’s mandate was squarely aimed at probing the Russian positions while offering a gesture of deterrence. Indeed, much of the critical negotiation in this war has been conducted by intelligence chiefs; delegations led by the heads of Russian and Ukrainian services are widely understood to carry real authority from their respective capitals. In that way this has been a deeply personalistic and personality driven moment - from all sides. Still, as significant as this development is, I will not be holding my breath for it to alter Moscow’s fundamental calculations. The Kremlin still has zero intention of halting the war.

(My Day Book Page 2023)

Today marks the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. What should be a happy occasion of commemoration sees the country continue its existential fight for survival. The Ukrainian state has now spent 12 of its 35 years of national independence at war with Russia (though some Ukrainians would surely make the case that in many ways the war between Moscow and Kyiv has been going on continuously since 1991).

In the meantime - this war of survival has necessitated that Ukraine recast itself into a modern state that combines the best of Athens and Sparta.

The military parade that took place in Kyiv today showcased Ukraine’s innovative new unmanned fighting vehicles and drones carriers.

Whatever his other (by now very well known) shortcomings, President Zelensky retained his particularly graceful sense of wartime stewardship. He executed his public duties as Commander in Chief with a seamless showing of humane sensitivity with martial resilience.

Which is essentially why the nation continues to support him- with the majority of Ukrainian citizens having the basic political common sense to reject calls for wartime elections made last week by Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

The average Ukrainian has remarkable political instincts.

My friend Melinda posted this from the parade:

For whatever reason, this photograph that I took in Kyiv- last year on August 24th -has stayed with me above all the other heartrending scenes that we have all observed over the last four and a half years.

This hideous war will likely continue going on for a very long time.

This upcoming winter will be a very cold one and the Russians will redouble their efforts to destroy Ukrainian electrical infrastructure in order to freeze the population in their beds. The Russians are cranking out a lot more ballistic missiles than they used to and more and more of these are getting through Ukrainian air defenses.

Last night, I became involved in a surreal argument with my partner in various journalistic ventures about which Kyiv Hotel we should book for our upcoming trip. We compared them on the quality of their basement missile bunker accommodations. I proposed that we stay in the Central Radisson Blu if the better hotels would be booked. He countered that the bunker in that one would leave us buried alive if we did not get incinerated by the ballistic missile strike. I suppose my friend won that argument.

Professional Ukrainian wartime travel tip for readers: The Hyatt and Intercontinental will not be aimed at directly by Russian rocket forces as foreign diplomats stay there. I would not make that same calculation about the Fairmont.

Despite - and some have argued because of -the war, an independent and remarkable and vivacious Ukrainian culture continues to grow and change and flow.

I have spent the last decade covering the process of the emergence of this dynamic new European national culture. Here is a selection of my own favorite pieces that I have written on the emergence/revolution of Ukrainian culture over the last several years:

Cultural Roots of Ukraine’s Love of Stamp Collecting (2022) The Washington Examiner

The Landscape of Ukrainian Literature - (2022) Tablet Magazine

Ukrainian Art Scene Making Waves Across Europe/Atlantic - (2025) The Kyiv Post

The Making of Ukrainian Jewish Culture - (2023) The Jewish Quarterly

Odessa Orchestra Under Threat - (2016) The Atlantic Council

Polish Lessons for Ukrainian Reconstruction (2023) - The Critic

Suprematism and the Poetry of Ukraine (2026) - The Manifesto! Podcast

(My daybook page from Minsk in August 2020).

Last week marked the sixth anniversary of the Belarusian people rising up against strongman Alexander Lukashenko after he stole the August 9th, 2020 presidential election. The attempt to overthrow the folksy Soviet hick styled and Russian-backed dictator was a heroic and beautiful failure. Lukashenko’s brutal and totally venal regime remains a lumbering Soviet relic. He had rigged the vote against the mostly female candidates who were permitted to stand in the election after the male opposition figures who were deemed an authentic threat were preemptively disqualified, jailed, or exiled abroad. When it became clear that the opposition had almost certainly triumphed, the population took to the streets of every city and town in the country. The regime initiated a wave of utterly savage repression against the ensuing peaceful protests. I spent a frenzied month in Minsk reporting on the revolution for Tablet, The Critic, Atlantic Council and Foreign Policy Magazine.

Opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the wife of an imprisoned political activist, unexpectedly garnered much of the vote; she was thrust into history and is now widely recognized as the head of the government-in-exile. A year later, I would interview her in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on the very weekend Belarus became a state of air pirates, forcing down a Ryanair flight as it traversed Belarusian airspace ( in order to kidnap a dissident journalist who was flying to Lithuania from Athens).

I was living in Paris at the time. On the evening after the mass demonstrations had broken out on August 9th, I called my friend Bernard-Henri Lévy and convinced him that this was indeed a real revolution- and that we needed to be there. BHL agreed to meet me at Charles de Gaulle Airport, bringing along a camera crew and his steadfast travel companion and best friend, Gilles Hertzog.

However, right at the moment that we prepared to board the Minsk-bound flight, the representatives at the Belavia Airlines check-in desk surprised us by informing us that my French philosopher friend was in fact listed on the Belarusian state sanctions list. Thus, he would not be allowed to board. “So… what did your friend do exactly to deserve being banished from Belarus?” the stolid, middle-aged Belavia manager asked me with fiercely narrowed eyes.

I did not want to leave Bernard behind. So, I began dialing the Ukrainian Embassy in Paris in order to try my luck with the Ukrainian military attaché, hoping that he might phone his counterpart at the Belarus Embassy and somehow clarify the situation. This, after all, was in the days before Belarus had joined Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Minsk and Kyiv diplomatic legations in Paris were still on speaking terms. My valiant efforts to get Bernard into the revolution with me all came for naught. Bernard told me and the rest of his friends to get on the plane without him. We would not likely get another chance to enter if events developed. Undeterred, my then (Ukrainian) wife and I arranged for BHL to interview Tsikhanouskaya for the Wall Street Journal, and as we boarded the flight to Minsk, he caught the next flight to Lithuania in order to see her. Tsikhanouskaya would later inform me that it was her first major interview as the de facto head of the opposition and that she had been terrified to meet a world-historical personality like Bernard.

At passport control in Minsk, the incoming international journalists and diplomats were being turned away at the border. I was forced to dissemble, claiming that we were a French camera crew devoted to finding the graves of my relatives killed by the Nazis in Babruysk (this indeed happened) and that my comrade Gilles wanted to see where his grandfather, a co-founder of the French Communist Party, had met with Lenin (surreally enough this also happened).

I somehow succeeded in charming and bluffing our way into Minsk.

Within a week it became obvious to me that that the uprising would fail - the Belarusians were simply too passive too fight the forces of repression arrayed against them. The massive rallies were brave, peaceful, and photogenic but the lack of capacity for force, lack of backing from the trade unions of a general strike and the implicit threat of Moscow sending in the tanks and paratroopers to save Lukashenko would ensure that the regime survived. On August 22, 2020 my article “The Belarus revolution may be too velvet to succeed” for the Atlantic Council predicated inevitable failure of the uprising: “The protesters are generally very sweet, polite, and peaceful….. For better or worse, there is a marked absence of the rough and stalwart young men capable of making liberals uncomfortable or leading the resistance if and when the authoritarian state decides to deploy force”

I concluded that while “a solid national majority, perhaps even a super-majority, appears to want a transition to liberal democracy, but the resistance of the Lukashenka regime is strengthening by the day. With Russia now seemingly standing firmly behind Lukashenka, photogenic rallies and patchy strike action will not be enough to bring about historic change.”

This is the video that I shot out of the window of my hotel room of the million man strong march that week -as the protestors marched on the Presidential Palace (and refused/failed to storm it!)

I kept the curtains wide open and kept my hands held high so that the OMON snipers who were stationed on the roof of parliament would not have an excuse to take me out…

I fell deeply in love with Minsk and the people that I met in Belarus.

I really can’t wait to go back to see the country after it transitions to something better.

The protestors were utterly heroic- very often the women - who courageously faced down the riot police.

(Punk rock democracy princess protestor holding up a sign urging Lukashenko to “уступи место женщине / give up your seat to a woman”.)

The hilarious, ridiculous and intrepid story of how the American State Department and Atlantic Council and U.S. intel services got me out of the country as the revolution was quashed and I was being harassed by the Belarus KGB is best left for another occasion.

Still, I have no doubt that in the medium term, the regime in Minsk will collapse and the lovely and decent and charming people of Belarus will have freedom. More likely than not, it will be the Ukrainian army that brings them their freedom.

Žyvie Biełaruś!

I have just published this very long and very textured interview in the Tel Aviv Review of Books- on the relationship between the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel wars as well as European and American attitudes to both, and broader Israel-Ukraine relations. Much of what we discussed with the TARB’s (exceedingly lovely!) Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki will be known to area experts, but I think that the material is rich and complex enough that anyone interested in the two files will learn something from our discussion.

The Ukrainian and Israeli files have long been intertwined in ways that were obvious to area experts but are only now becoming intelligible to the broader public. Anyone who is now complaining about the “melding of the two wars” simply does not understand that it was always two fronts of the same war….

https://www.tarb.co.il/europe-and-a-tale-of-two-wars/

Finally-

I wanted to share this video of the Black Sea Security Forum at the end of May in Odessa…. I moderated a panel on the future of tech, AI and war along with the Ukrainian Minister of Digitalization and my friend Max Novendstern ( Founder & CEO of Mana)…

This turned out to be a really interesting discussion on the future of AI and the need for an indigenous Ukrainian AI and LLM.

Highly recommended:

From the archives: Me and Max in Odessa in collage form:

(My daybook page from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Summer 2026)

Kyrgyzstan Diary

Bishkek August 2026

I have spent the last several weeks of this sweltering summer in my native Central Asia.

The Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek is somehow both drably provincial and exceedingly glamorous at once.

My mother and aunt would spend their 1970s summers with our Russian relatives here when the city was still called Frunze. When it was still named for the Soviet revolutionary and general who was born here when the city was an important outpost of the Russian empire. And never returned after leaving town at the age of twelve.

The tidy capital was undergoing a growth spurt - a few dozen construction cranes silhouetted against the distant Ala-Too mountain range.

The cranes were lazily erecting the usual assortment of post-Soviet architectural confections and monstrosities.

The vulgar hodgepodge of tasteless, brutalist, Greco-Deco towers that will be familiar to anyone who has ever traveled through the former Eastern Bloc.

Coming from Ukraine and the post-post-post-Soviet part of Eastern Europe, I found myself astonished at how deeply soviétique the easygoing and imperial-planned capital remained.

Bishkek is in dire need of a properly frenetic bout of decommunization.

Thirty-five years after they ought to have been pulled down, the statues of Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky (my Jewish interior ministry officer grandfather was named for him my NKVD commissar great grand father the year that the Polish Jew hater died) remain sinisterly in the middle of the city center.

A Soviet obelisk from1963 commemorates the 100th anniversary of the “peaceful integration of the region into the Russian Empire”.

The most captivating architectural specimens were the classic 1960s Soviet modernist buildings - I really liked the Bishkek city circus.

I found the Kyrgyz to be direct, elegant, helpful and affable -

- very likely the most straight forward people in Central Asia.

My sojourn to the leafy and dusty town had began as a kind of film noir assignment.

One that I will only be free to discuss in future dispatches. Or perhaps in my memoirs.

The work, however, was merely a pretext.

Journalism, travel, making art, and espionage are merely ways to pass the time.

The real reason for my excursion was both utterly mundane and infinitely grand:

a love affair.

Over the previous months, I had grown deeply fascinated with a well - known Central Asian artist. An aristocratic bad girl of Kyrgyz-Tatar descent whose artwork, social activism and insouciant antics were carefully catalogued on her popular Instagram account. The daughter of a prominent politician, she possessed a fierce, haughty, and sultry aura. I instinctively knew that she would be mine from the second that I had stumbled upon her account. The intense correspondence that followed blossomed into a full-blown courtship. Conducted in the grand and courtly Central Asian style.

My first real-life encounter with my paramour took place at a high-end steakhouse the evening when I arrived. I presented her with a massive suitcase that I had stuffed with several thousand dollars of art monographs that I had selected in various New York bookstores before my flight.

Motherwell, Kiefer, Gorky, Rauschenberg, Johns, Duchamp, Katz, Morandi and Hesse.

She was as infatuated as I was.

After dinner, I swore on my Central Asian honor that I would help her become a great artist.

I swiftly inked my promises in my calligraphic script onto a leaf ripped straight from one of the volumes of French symbolist poetry that I had brought her.

Without missing a beat, she called the maître d’ over and requested the sharpest steak knife be brought from the kitchen.

I offered up my left hand.

She scanned my face for fear and hesitation before delivering a violent slash across my palm and left thumb.

I slammed my bloody left paw print theatrically onto the table.

Smearing the contract with blood and wine.

The artist was both excited and embarrassed by how deeply she had sliced open my hand.

She commenced licking the blood off the cleaver and my hand with intoxicating grace and performative savagery.

Kissing my wound tenderly, she proceeded to take a selfie of our vow for the edification of her hundreds of thousands of dedicated Instagram followers.

I staunched my bleeding thumb with a vintage silk Japanese handkerchief that I carried in my left pocket.

I had gotten exactly what I had flown to Central Asia for.

At the exactly correct moment, the former President of Estonia Toomas Ilves called …

I was intoxicated with excitement and wanted to show off my new crush.

I put Ilves on the speakerphone to introduce my new beloved.

The ever wise and elegant Ilves proffered up a graceful and welcome assist:

“Well… you do know that Vlad is a great guy… but you also do know that he is crazy, right? Is he your boyfriend now?”

“Time will tell,” the artist riposted with a laugh.

“And I know that he’s crazy…

I thought I was crazy… but then I met him!”

(Philosopher Curtis Yarvin boxing Ambassador John Herbst with Lev Polyakov as referee and my presiding as Emperor from the galleys. Image courtesy of Lev Polyakov)

Greetings to all from (my ancestral) Central Asia!

This dispatch comes to you live from a beach side yurt at the Issyk-Kul Lake in Kyrgyzstan.

Devoted readers will surely notice (and forgive) that I have been on a prolonged hiatus from writing here. I have spent the last month traveling and recuperating from the unrelenting intensity of the last five years of my life.

The covid lockdown, followed by a war and a divorce and familial turbulence will test the mettle of even the strongest man. For those of my readers who are unaware of this picaresque bit of my biography- I was born in Tashkent and lived in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan until the age of four. When the Berlin Wall collapsed it was time to leave. My family decamped to Moscow in order to wait for an American visa and permission to leave the Soviet Union.

Upon arriving in Kyrgyzstan, I found out that my own mother and aunt used to spend their summer vacations at the Issyk-Kul lake…!

My mother informed me that in the late sixties and early seventies she would travel to the lake from Uzbekistan while sitting on straw and bales of cotton packed into the back of an agricultural flatbed truck!

The Soviet Union had yet to discover the comforts of minivans and air-conditioned tour buses.

A tangent before we get to the main card: we have all been watching the spectacle of conservative American political pyromaniac Laura Loomer executing her about-face and riotous joining up with the Ukrainian cause. After years of channeling vulgar Kremlin propaganda, Loomer has defected to the side of light. She has apologized for falling for Russian propaganda. Apologizing is something that people in the public eye rarely do nowadays. Kudos to her.

Whatever one thinks of her and her motivations - her decision to make the trip to the besieged and continually bombarded city of Kharkiv -a mere 40 miles from the Russian border -is undeniably a remarkable display of legitimate courage. I am one of those who is exceedingly happy at this turn of events- even if she does remain a loose cannon and is using the engagement for her internal grappling with competitors on the conservative social media Right.

Some people continue to criticize her - her tweets about Muslims in Ukraine immediately reminded everyone how controversial she is even when defending common sense moderation. The Crimean Tatars- a core Ukrainian constituency in the fight against Russian imperialism- were forced to bite their lips for the greater good. Yet, traveling to Kharkiv as Loomer has done is no joke. It is an entirely and authentically dangerous thing to do and no one can offer her security guarantees in that besieged city. Loomer has also spent the last weeks pushing back against others on the online right against the Russian rhetoric about Ukrainian neo-Nazis—even meeting with the Azov guys and Azov’s founder Biletsky.

I would like to personally welcome Ms. Loomer to join the Judeo-Banderite clan!

Which brings us to the main event on the fight card—one I recently had the pleasure of organizing in Washington D.C. last month: Curtis Yarvin vs. John Herbst.

At the risk of losing a few subscribers, I must publicly confess to being a friend of the ever-scandalous Curtis Yarvin. Yes, indeed -the dark Neo-Reactionary necromancer guru of American monarchic technocratic feudalism is a man I care about. Even as we clash fiercely on matters of geopolitics, Curtis remains a brilliant, loyal, and thoroughly engaging fellow. He is a good friend, and he has bailed me out in a few difficult moments. He certainly often does say stuff simply to rile up liberals and progressives. Whom amongst us is not a provocatuer? Naturally, I have spent the last three years attempting to convert him to the righteousness of the Ukrainian cause. The campaign has included several of my own public sparring matches on Lev Polyakov’s Break the Rules podcast. It is also the place where I first met Yarvin during a debate- and for this too- I am grateful to Mon. Polyakov.

Likewise, I hold Ambassador John Herbst in tremendous esteem. As the American Ambassador to Ukraine, he was a pivotal figure in Kyiv during the 2024 Orange Revolution. He is a true titan of the old school, and he was unfailingly kind and supportive to me during my five years as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. Herbst was also instrumental in making sure that I was not arrested and tortured in Minsk during the 2020 uprising in Belarus after strongman Lukashenka stole yet another election.

Herbst is a deeply well-read man with a thorough grasp of American political and diplomatic history- and one of the very few people operating now in D.C. who would even have heard of many of the reactionary European political thinkers that Yarvin has studied and mastered. When I look at Herbst and compare him to American elites a generation or two younger than him- it is entirely obvious to me that American leadership is in steep decline.

Organizing this theatrical and brash debate between the two men felt less like a run-of-the-mill D.C. policy panel and more like organizing an exquisite piece of gladiatorial combat. Watching Herbst and Yarvin grapple on the nature of the Russia-China-Iran axis, European hegemony, and the limits of American power is an education as well as an entertainment. This is a clash between two supreme expositors of their respective American worldviews. I highly recommend watching the whole debate.

While both men emerge broadly from the American Right, they could not be more wildly divergent in their worldviews, ideological predispositions, and historical acumen. Both are sons of the American diplomatic apparatus - Yarvin’s father was himself a State Department man before his son set out to architect its absolute dissolution.

Herbst vigorously defends the worldview of a sober, traditional American Atlanticism and the need for prudent strategic intervention and management of the American-European- Anglo alliance. Detractors of this world view flippantly dismiss this sober establishmentarianism as a form of “retrograde boomerism”. Other critics lump this approach in with the Neo- Conservative or realist traditions. It manifestly is neither.

Yarvin argued from his isolationist, anti-interventionist position. His is the extreme variant of the view that America has no legitimate interests in Europe outside of the English Channel. The two men sparred over the furthest reaches of U.S. security boundaries and the implications of Yarvin’s worldview that Europe apriori has no right to the American defense umbrella- and never did. Yarvin sees justifications of the European -American alliances as being fundamentally antiquated and rooted in early Twentieth century Anglo-American imperialism. Herbst explains to At one point in the exchange, Herbst actually calls Yarvin out for “giving away the game if [you] don’t think that Hitler was a serious threat to American national security.” He also posits that Yarvin is simply a highly intelligent man who has not thought through these issues very carefully. “You are a very smart man but do not know much about Russia or Ukraine” he continued.

Much gratitude to my stalwart friend Lev Polyakov for making this happen and for his rigorous work in animating the debate. Wether you are an isolationist, monarchist, liberal, post- Soviet nationalist or conservative security type - do enjoy this bout comrades!

My painted collage drawing of Chania, Crete.

This poem was published yesterday in Spectra Poets Magazine.

  Cadenza for my debased WASP Bushwick bartender


          for K.



    My libertine lover
           came on the Mayflower
            clutching 
    a volume of Lord Rochester 
right, against her muscled thigh 

   Cadenza for my debased WASP 
     Bushwick bartender
  my bunched and purloined plot 
 against America   
 “her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt”
       encrusting my lyric filth
     against her adulation  

     that
   old time
     ost jude 
   off the boat
fantasia
  
     cadenza for my debased WASP 
Bushwick bartender
    smeared over 
   her pearlescent breasts
  and comic grace
       “you’re no coward… 
    but a militant comedian”
  she swooned me

      I implored her to accept
     an offer regal restitution
     for the litigious sins 
of her vulgar Yid landlord
  dinner 
   drinks
      schlong

   that
     old time
   ost jude
  off the boat
fantasia

      “I am reading Farewell to Arms”
      she tells me
      “so we will fuck 
 at least once more”

     I write her this at war 
frayed baroque carpeting
        of the Odessa hotel bunker 
       quaking trembling
  shuddering 

     that
    old time
ost jude
    off the boat
fantasia

swaying chandelier 
         quivering with carnal violation 
    the Russian Kamikaze drones
     less fierce 
than her caresses

My expressionist day book page portrait of my friend - American art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky.

Kazimir Malevich was a Polish gentleman from Kyiv - and when the Boryspil international airport reopens after the war- it may very well be renamed in his honor.

Malevich is currently being reclaimed by Ukrainians from the Russian canon -just one of many Ukrainian and proto- Ukrainian artists being recovered from the utterly sordid clutches of Russian imperial art-historical appropriation. The New York Times ran a serviceable piece on this aspect of the [culture] war in December.

Last week the swaggering Jacob Siegel and Phil Klay had me on their amazing Manifesto! podcast to discuss Malevich’s The Manifesto of Suprematism as well as the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan. We discussed the context of his work and life and writings within the revolutionary times that produced him. As well as the process of artistic canon construction in the middle of a war. It was a great conversation and I was thrilled with the chance to go on one of my absolute favorite podcasts.

Siegel, a long time colleague of mine at Tablet Magazine, has also just published “The Information State” his new book on America Big Tech and the “disinformation” industry. The supposition that a steady stream of “unregulated misinformation” was fueling domestic extremism remains convincing in many quarters. I have not yet read the book- but having followed Jacob’s work on this issue for years- no doubt that it is an excellent contribution.

My brilliant and vivacious art critic friend Barry Schwabsky has unearthed a charming little discovery…..

It is a reader’s recommendation on whether to publish George Perec’s Life a User’s Manuel… the Italian poet, critic essayist and Marxist intellectual Franco Fortini .

Barry Schwabsky

Fortini Contra Perec

I just came across this little text and got such a kick out of it: Franco Fortini’s reader’s report to Einaudi editore on Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Life, A User’s Manual…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Barry Schwabsky

I just came across this little text and got such a kick out of it: Franco Fortini’s reader’s report to Einaudi editore on Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Life, A User’s Manual):

“È straordinario nel senso di un ordinario sistematico ed è vuoto nel senso di un pieno assoluto e irrespirabile. È il sogno supremo di essere più intelligente del compagno di banco. Divertente, e spiritoso nei particolari. Iettatorio come un quadro di Magritte; noiosissimo nell’insieme. Perfettamente kitsch come il suo titolo. Contributo alla creazione di sottoletteratura. Con tutto questo, il mio parere è SI.”

--or as Google translates it:

“It’s extraordinary in the sense of a systematic ordinary, and it’s empty in the sense of an absolute, unbreathable fullness. It’s the ultimate dream of being smarter than your classmate. Fun, and witty in its details. As jinxed as a Magritte painting; extremely boring overall. Perfectly kitsch, like its title. A contribution to the creation of subliterature. All things considered, my opinion is YES.”

(Einaudi did not publish the book.)

Incidentally, I found the quote here: https://www.doppiozero.com/fortini-il-libro-e-brutto-pubblichiamolo

What do you think?

Barry wants to know what we think.

Life: A User's Manual was Perec’s masterpiece- a novel erected on a square. It follows the ordinary intertwined lives of the residents of an ordinary Parisian apartment block.

It is a mathematical puzzle as well as an imaginative act of literature.

For what it’s worth, I do think Fortini’s advice an affirmative and intense "yes" on publication- was obviously the correct call. Yet, to judge the construction of one of the grandest buildings in all of literature as both “extremely boring” and “pitch-perfect kitch” was an act of philistinism. The most generous defense of Fortini that I can muster is that perhaps he and his generation of critics had yet to assimilate the innovations of the OULIPIANs (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle)…

Many readers do find the mathematical wordplay, perorations, and symmetrical structures of much Oulipian output to be trying. Many of these experiments failed to produce actual literature- which certainly cannot - will not be said of Perec’s constructions and confections. At least not on my watch!

Here are a few pieces that I wrote about Perec in Paris during my abhorrently misspent mid twenties:

“The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a workshop, movement and a taxonomic method, sprang up in the early 1960s with the intention of fusing the crystalline purity of mathematics with the formal constraints of literary play — puzzles crafted out of literary texts that sprung up from puzzles. The movement tinkered fruitfully and often pointlessly, with genres ranging from murder mysteries to crossword puzzles and palindromes. It counted Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Jacques Roubaud among its savviest practitioners.”

Interpreting the Holocaust Dreams of Literary Puzzle Master Georges Perec

How To Ask for a Raise, Over and Over Again

Is Vladislav Davidzon a bad Jew?

You, dear reader, may not have pondered that question.

However others certainly have!

Emily Tamkin’s Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities attempts to answer that critical question definitely. I picked up a copy of her book in New York City this week - Tamkin quoted me ranting about the conformist striving tendencies of American Jews as well as my own failed assimilation process for two whole pages in the book’s chapter on refugee Jews…

“I’ve had and squandered opportunities that other people could have only dreamed of”…..

(Calligraphic Ink painting from my daybook - Japanese postcard I purchased in the old Japanese capital of Nara in my early twenties cover with ink stamps and wash…)

New York City -

I attended the opening night of downtown wunderkind playwright Matthew Gasda’s “The Last Days of Downtown” last week. My Tablet Magazine colleague and comrade in arms David Mikics invited me along …. Mikics is a fantastic literary critic and writer -doubtless one of America’s best working critics…

During the intermission, when Mikics’ wife was out of hearing range -I inquired of the critic if his wife hated me.

“She does not hate you…”

“Does she like me?”

“I would not go that far…” he riposted sagely.

I informed him that I have many male friends whose wives do not love me…

“I see you understand,” responded the author of the best biography of Stanley Kubrick of the last twenty years.

The Gasda play is very much an acquired taste- an amusing, smart, self-referential, and elegant disquisition on the annoying, smart, amusing downtown world. After the play some young viewers asked me with the earnestness of youth - “Is it ok to enjoy how knowing it is in making fun of us?”

Everyone insists that Dimes Square did not produce any great art…

The culture may be debased and is indeed often very insufferable -

Yet- Gasda really is quite talented.

At the end of the play’s second act, one of the actors quipped about “Suzy Weiss of the Free Press not even having written about this yet.” At which point I noticed that Suzy was sitting in the row diagonal from me.

Suzy promptly blew me an air kiss...

During the intermission, she told me that I looked great (having lost the weight that I had put on drinking during the war).

I assured her that I was not “on the O!”-it was merely the effect of having a beautiful young ballerina in my life keeping me on my tippy-toes.

If the phrases “meet me at Clandestino” or “we are only going down to the new Sov House for anthropological reasons” have ever come out of your mouth—the play was written for you, dearest reader.

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Alexander Kluge- novelist, theorist, public intellectual, poet and titan of the 1960’s New German Cinema movement died last Wednesday in Munich.

He died at the age of 94.

My old film festival circuit pal A.J. Goldmann (he is a very brilliant and penetrating art/ film critic in his own right) has penned Kluge’s NYTimes obit:

“In a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed films, books, television productions and art installations, Mr. Kluge attempted to distill the entire intellectual, literary and artistic history of modern Germany, including the trauma and often-suppressed guilt of the postwar period.”

I first read Kluge at University.

I was plowing through the avant-garde cannon at a manic clip- and his work ravished my mind dear reader!

He put out these books of masterful, intense and odd short stories that struck one at the exact right moment in time. He also wrote “theory” - and this was around 2006-08 as everyone was nattering on about the “death of the death of theory”…

That was the time of Terry Eagleton and numerous other literary critics publishing books with titled such as “After theory”.

Recently - Kluge collaborated on a book on Venice and poetry with the American novelist Ben Lerner… Their literary dialogue was published as "The Snows of Venice". It was illustrated by Gerhard Richter's 1970s Venice photographs. What’s not to love?

Another day-book page from my archives—this is my review of the book Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake by Daniel E. Sutherland for The Art Newspaper a decade ago….

The piece is not online for whatever reason on their website.

The volume, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake, was a major biography that was innovative in its usage of the artist’s private correspondence.

Also -reading it I learned that Whistler ran guns in South America!

Who amongst us, dear readers? Who amongst us?

Front page of my 2026 planner with the Ex Libris of Percival Goodman that I convinced the Librarian at Avery Library at Columbia to give me!

(Page from my daybook)

I spent several months in Iran as a very young man. I grew to deeply love the country and to despise the tyrannical regime subjugating it. It is not the place to go into how I spent my days and nights in Persia; suffice to say that I certainly cannot go back until the fall of the regime.

In my mid-twenties, I spent months attempting to imbibe a bit of Persian in Tehran. I intend to get it back up to the level of reading poetry this year. I still follow internal Iranian politics and support the opposition movement.

Anyways, my experiences in Tehran, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Isfahan taught me to deeply despise the regime—and I have been involved in the American debates for and against the JCPOA (which I opposed vehemently from the very start) over the last decade.

The internet is currently awash with Iran commentary and analysis -much of it deeply feckless, partisan, insipid, and amateurish. I do not wish to add anything - the number of experts on the region (real and newly minted) is immense enough -for the time being; however, I have spent the last three years banging the drum on the conflict between Iran and Ukraine….

The Russian war in Ukraine is in many ways the fault of the Obama administration; which chose to forgo imposing serious sanctions and costs on the Russians after the forced annexation of Crimea in 2014. The Obama people (STILL!) wanted a reset, and needed the Russians on the Iran deal—which they had no intention of scuppering to impose costs on Russia for violating (and de facto dismantling) the post-World War II taboo on the changing of state boundaries by force.

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I also do not intend to return to the arguments over the correctness of the Trump administration policy. The WSJ’s great, sage and irreplaceable Walter Russel Mead had the most cogent analysis when he concluded that both sides of the debate had a point: “First, many Iran doves seriously underestimated the risks and costs of attempting to coexist with the regime. Second, many Iran hawks seriously underestimated the risks and costs of opposing Tehran’s drive for regional hegemony through military action. The result is a war that is more necessary than doves thought and harder to wage than hawks supposed.”

By the way -I cannot recommend Mead’s podcast with my old pal and editor Jeremy Stern, “What Really Matters,” highly enough -it is truly excellent.

Anyway - Ukraine has long been a core part of an international war being fought by the revisionist anti-democratic Axis against the free world. When the anti-Nato types invoke the “proxy war” arguments - they are not wrong - they merely do not understand who started that war. Or who should win it.

Many people throughout the West did not understand this fact until the start of the Israeli and American bombing campaign. Much of the Twitter left commentariat was aghast and shocked when Zelenskyy publicly voiced his support for the war against the Ayatollahs. They simply did not understand how he could be on “the wrong side” here. Perhaps it is our fault in the media for not making what should have been universally obvious -just a bit slightly more obvious.

The Iranians have spent the last three years firing Shahed drones at Ukrainian civilian housing and energy infrastructure.

I have personally been bombed by the Shaheds (and their Russian-produced and enhanced variants) in Odessa and Kyiv and all along the frontlines. I still look for cover every time I hear an American lawn mower.

My mother’s Israeli (Belarus-born) cousin was killed by a Hezbollah launched missile on Oct 7 (it had been provided by the Iranian regime). Some of my Arab friends have been bombed by Russian airplanes in Syria who were being guided by Iranian IRGC guys.

Much of the commentary on Ukrainian -Iranian relations weirdly negates speaking about the Iranians shooting an Ukrainian Airlines Jet out of the sky in 2020!

I wrote about the downing of flight 752 in the Spectator at the time. Incidentally, I knew one of the flight attendants who was killed on that flight from the days when I used to commute weekly between Paris and Kyiv before the start of the Russian full scale invasion.

Valeriia was a gentle and sweet girl. She was also far from the only lovely Ukrainian young woman to have her future ended unjustly by the Iranians.

The Ukrainians have now offered their services in helping break the Iranian naval blockade of the Hormuz Strait.

The countermeasures that the Ukrainians have engineered are now the cutting edge in anti-air defense systems - and are being clamored for by every Sheikh, King and Emir in the Arab Gulf. The Ukrainian Defense industry will be making a fortune, and four years after begging the world for air cover over Ukrainian skies- the Ukrainian army has more capacity to offer it to the world than does NATO.

The West is also not going to be able to tamp down Ukrainian attacks against Russian infrastructure (which increase energy prices for everyone) without also putting something else on the table first…. It turns out that the war in Iran has slightly increased the Ukrainian advantages instead of radically decreasing them as many commentators had first predicted.

Politico- ”Zelensky discussed the matter during his visit to the Gulf. Ukraine would share its know-how from breaking Russia’s naval blockade of Odesa in the Black Sea: The strategy would involve defense against air attacks, protection against sea mines, as well as coordinated operations by coastal artillery, the air force, and other units. Naval drones would play a decisive role.”

It is a remarkable irony of history that Ukraine is on its way to substituting the Russian state as a military power in the Middle East!

In recent days, President Zelenskyy has publicly refused to cease hammering the Russian oil industry and export infrastructure: “Ukraine received signals from some partners to reduce our retaliatory strikes on the Russian oil sector…. Only if Russia is ready to stop striking at Ukrainian energy, we will pause strikes on their energy infrastructure.”

The Ukrainians are serving the function of tying up Russian resources in Ukraine - thus reducing the amount of assistance that they might be able proffer their Iranian allies. Ukrainian attacks will continue and will continue to provide Kyiv leverage in negotiations with the Americans.

Page from my daybook.

Amoretti Ballerina Catherina II

II.

Unhappy bade reproach -

Where is this ravishing veneration?

Where are those verses of adoration?

bid the task of preempting

all those other men

who wrote atrocious poems…

Fairly warned

against debased and tired syntax

craftily recalling

“Цель творчества — самоотдача”

My discontented

contumelious phrasing ——

d’un pleur involontaire made apparent

— but sweetly not too late -

my largiloquent foot

in mouth renunciation

meant nothing

salved even less.

(Page from my daybook archives..)

The Ukrainians are quickly attaining parity in the total number of drones being launched toward the enemy over the (international) border.

The Ukrainian army has reportedly launched a salvo of more than 280 drones towards various Russian targets overnight. Making this “one of Kyiv's largest barrages since the start of the war” according to Russian state media reporting over the weekend.

With the difference being that the Russians make a point of targeting civilian infrastructure while the Ukrainians target Russian military, oil refineries, energy infrastructure and military industrial capacity.

Ukrainian President (and honorary Jewish Hetman) Volodymyr Zelenskyy - I myself never understood why the Ukrainian Presidential Administration had standardized that particular transliteration of his name (!) - has expressed the Ukrainian state’s desire to play a central role in restoring shipping security in the Strait of Hormuz. The Ukrainian capacity in counter-drone warfare can only be matched by that of the Russian army. The Ukrainians are now openly assisting at least five Middle Eastern states in the Gulf region in countering Iranian drone barrages of the kind we have all grown accustomed to in Kyiv, Kherson and Odessa. My sources inform me that numerous other parties in the region have sought more discreet assistance. The Ukrainians will rightly ask for anti- missile tech in exchange for the expertise.

At dinner with academic friends in New York City tonight, I admitted that I still instinctively look for cover whenever I hear the sound of a lawn mower (which is what the old Shahed models sound like). Last week I attended the excellent Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival 2026: Mosaics in New York City with a close Ukrainian-American friend. He had also spent time under Russian bombing. We mutually agreed to leave after the intermission - we did not want to hear a piece of contemporary Ukrainian music that featured the sounds of explosions and incoming missiles. We had both simply heard enough of that in Ukraine - and did not want to hear it again in New York.

The composer, incidentally, had forbidden his work to be performed in Ukraine before the end of the war.

The Ukrainians have gotten exceedingly good at smashing up Russian oil terminals:

PBS has reported that “Zelenskyy has previously said he hoped to provide expertise to Arab Gulf countries targeted by Iranian Shahed drones, versions of which are heavily used by Moscow's invading forces, in exchange for advanced air defense missiles that Ukraine needs to counter devastating Russian aerial attacks. Kyiv fears it will get fewer of the sophisticated missiles it needs to fend off the Russian strikes as the Iran war burns through stockpiles.”

The last several weeks have seen tremendous numbers of pieces published on Ukrainian drone warfare all around the world….. Many seem to have caught up with the fact that the Ukrainians have gone on a counter offensive ever since Elon Musk decided to flip the switch on Russian forces’ usage of the Starlink internet capacity in early February.

To their credit - Politico got the message by Feb 25… “A decision earlier this month by SpaceX to shut down access to Starlink satellite-internet terminals caused immediate chaos among Russian forces who had become increasingly reliant upon the Elon Musk-owned company’s technology to sustain their occupation of Ukraine, according to radio transmissions intercepted by a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit”….

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I have been looking through my archives lately - and thinking about the literary pieces and reviews that I wrote in my mid to late twenties.

I have often written about the work of my poet friend Nada Gordon:

Searching through my archives I came across an old issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books, from 2011…. That august periodical is now edited by the delightful Eric Lorberer.

Anyway I adore Nada Gordon as both a poet and a friend- and our friendship was forged partly by my having written about her over the years.

I got my start as a writer as a book critic. That is writing as a pure book reviewer back when one could still enter the profession in that manner!

The Rain Taxi Review of Books, for which I wrote a half a dozen pieces in my twenties, is now a solid institutional little magazine of the old school….

It is “a little bit samizdat, a little bit grassroots” according to Lorberer.

This is my review of Gordon’s 6th book “Scented Rushes”:

Scented Rushes, Nada Gordon's sixth book, gives fair warning of its intent to re-ink the surrealist cartography of the path to the Red Queen's court with its title poem/epigram, a denuded version of Alice's soliloquy while reaching for a shimmering mirage patch in the prologue of Through The Looking Glass. To claim sweet and feisty Alice as one's punky prodigal stepmother is par for the course, but to sand and polish the text down to its lascivious essentials and grasping prevarications ("The prettiest are always further!" she said / at last with a sigh at the obstinacy of the rushes / in growing so far off. Flushed cheeks and dripping // hair and hands") is to declare most forcefully that this rabbit hole, dear friends, will be so much sexier and loopier then the last. One organizing principle, honorable sin, and underlying weakness of Language Poetry has always been it's gluttonous consumption of and reveling in words on the purely sonic level. This was the formalist's critical riposte, the structuralist answer to the existentialist fallacy of the individuated and delineated historical subject in philosophy, as well as to the recognizably sonorous melody of authorial voice in poetry.

Gordon's work certainly follows the orthodox rites of her de-nomination. From the repetitive particularity of the bowing liminal flourish to the verb's descriptive velocity accelerated into actionism, the unexpected turn of phrase dispensing with rapacious turns of direction, the gaping hole lacuna in the place of the narrator, a predilection to anchor the line with a ponderous or abstruse word, and finally the Chthonic tendency toward uneven internal rhymes, she deploys the movement's entire conceptual tool kit.

Yet, the style is the thing. What differentiates Gordon's oeuvre from the rest of her Language school cohort has always been a sort of inimitable brute vivaciousness, a sprightly cadenced luster spilling over into lugubriousness. Unlike so much writing produced by her peers, her work is eminently readable. It transcends the theoretical armature and arid strictures of the form by dint of charm and finishes the race with a buoyant perspicuity. Reading her bears a sense of relief that is borne along by her technical ingenuity in toggling and switching between multiple registers, whole spectrums of feel-ing. Most good poets contain multitudes, this one contains hoards. Witness the disorienting effect wrought by a whimsical line like "I have a neural spatter of dayglo prurience" followed by the ordinary/languid/deflationary /odd/sinister
"The train fills with Jews." The romantic delicacy of a line such as "I was and always belong to you, my lyre," can be counterpoised against the poised élan of "Only sheen gives ardor to a croon in this twinkly holomorph," and that to the loose grab-bag elucidations of "Stunned daffy energy / morphosing on the lipid / pleasure of revolution / in tartan tights. I love... “ When her cannon’s vector is set to maximalist barrage we get bombarded by masterpieces like “I am truly chiaroscuro glottal mucus slippage,” or “The environment does bukkake on me.“ Cleared of line breaks, her lines might be rendered back into originating quirky epigrams.
Writing about these poems engenders the fatal temptation to launch into profligate flights of description, to speak of their grandiloquent, effervescent, baroque rigging, their fleshy ontic voluptuousness reaching for any living manifestation of enunciation-like Alice reaching for those thrushes. These capricious ecstasies are Scented

What differentiates Gordon's oeuvre from the rest of her Language school cohort has always been a sort of inimitable brute vivaciousness... only adumbrated by the recurring technique of the screeching halt about-face. It is as if while rushing through the monstrous lights and gargantuan electrified boulevards of Tokyo (a city where arcane classicism is intertwined with outre modernity in extremity, and not uncoincidentally, where Gordon spent a decade, which she references continuously with lines like "I've come to be obsessed with ONIGIRI!"), we veer off suddenly into an unadorned dark alley where we meet a bland "timid crust of need on the surface of false order," a dead end and a dull barrier to emotional accessibility. This sudden dimming of the neon lights is the key to the deep core of sadness in Scented Rushes.

Looming like a juggernaut over everything here is the very publicly chronicled collapse of her marriage with fellow Language poet and Flarf collective member Gary Sullivan-a continuation of the intensely lyrical refusal of private/public cleaving that has characterized Gordon's work. A decade after co-publishing one of the most thrilling and seductive literary correspondences in the English language, Swoon (Granary Books, 2001) she writes of the "The Scars that swoon beneath the beauty of marriage." This book is the first in five not effusively dedicated to Sullivan but to "my imaginary friend." This jarring shock of events seems to have spawned an evolution of her work away from the contorted set-piece acrobatics and histrionic comedy by committee of the Flarfists, a facet of her writerly persona brought to the forefront in Folly (Roof Books, 2007), towards something less stilted and performative—a re-turn, perhaps, to the more nuanced word choices, diction, and leavened enjambment of Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker Than Night Swollen Mushrooms? (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001).

Finally, in Scented Rushes surrealist collage illustrations of animal heads on top of Renaissance babes and cupids signal that there will be no conclusion to the lyrical Georgian dress up-romanticism, even in its wired-up cybernetic postmodern guise, is not a task for futurists. The best that can be said of this supremely manic, frustrating, and boundlessly talented book is that anything made of its constituent parts would have been a complete mess in the hands of a poet with less grace.

(Patriarch Filaret, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, conducts service at St. Volodymyr's Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine, 2018. (AP
Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ukrainian Patriarch Filaret, a titan of Ukrainian church and political history, has passed away at the age of 97. The existence of a truly independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church free from what Ukrainian patriots would describe as almost a thousand years of Russian domination, a history stretching back to the Baptism of Rus’ in Kyiv in 988 A.D. is very much his legacy.

Passed over for the position of Moscow Patriarch in 1992, Filaret pivoted and became the central figure in the struggle for Ukrainian autocephaly and national identity, ultimately freeing the Ukrainian church from centuries of subordination to Moscow and securing its independence. I wrote about the Ukrainian church schism with the Russians and Costantinople in 2018:

(yes indeed... your humble correspondent is not merely a Jewish-artist -weirdo aesthete - playboy- he also dabbles in church theology!)

“The theological pretext for the split was based on unwinding a 1686 decision that allowed Moscow ordination rights over clergy in the Ukrainian church, which thus became subordinated to the Moscow patriarchate. That decision had, in effect, created a pair of competing Orthodox churches on Ukrainian territory.

The outcome of the Synod’s decision in Minsk was essentially to codify the most important schism in Eastern Christianity in almost a millennium since representatives of the Roman Pope Leo IX arrived in Constantinople to place a bull of excommunication on the altar of the church of Hagia Sophia in 1054. The Russian church, which has close links to the Kremlin and is widely seen as actively supporting the political objectives of the Russian state, will now no longer be in communion with Constantinople.

The church schism is the latest in a series of volatile cleavages as Ukraine moves to separate itself from the Russian sphere of influence, a process that has in turn only intensified Russian aggression against the Ukrainian state.

Elements of the Russian church - and many of its priests- took a clearly anti-Ukrainian position in early 2014. I often like to joke about the competition between the Russian backed church and the Ukrainian independent church as a kind of market division with the Russians retaining all the best church real estate in Kyiv.

When Ukraine first became an independent state in the early 1990s, Filaret would become a leading driver in establishing the Kyiv Patriarchate as independent theological structure. Thus building the foundations for the later creation of a single church independent of Russian domination. He will doubtless be remembered as an important — if complex and not unflawed — figure in the history of the Ukrainian national independence movement. I recall that even atheists, Jews, and Muslims in Ukraine were declaring themselves on social media at the time: “Jewish, but of the Kyiv Patriarchate,” “Muslim — Kyiv Patriarchate,” and so on.

I only spoke to him once in person very briefly - we sat next to each other at the 2016 Babyn Yar massacre commemorations taking place in the Ukrainian parliament. He was austere and grand in person.

A year after the new church was founded, he became embroiled in internal church conflict with his successor as Metropolitan of the OCU, Epiphanius I, over the particulars of the unification process, eventually breaking from that understanding and declaring himself Metropolitan. Whether it was pride or an incapacity to let go is for the church historians to explain. No matter. As one church commentator observed: “He became the leading voice calling for autocephaly and initiated the extremely important process of translating liturgical texts into Ukrainian, restoring the church’s national identity.”

(Cheburahska and his friend Gena)

I am deeply grateful for the New York Times discovering the fact that Cheburashka was Jewish. This is a deeply important development comrades.

The Russians are also (quite) predictably making culture war over that beloved avatar of all our Soviet and Post-Soviet childhood(s). Go read Alex Nazaryan - a very good writer - on Cheburashka in the NYTimes:

“He might be a monkey, or maybe a bear. It never really mattered to the generations of Soviet children who embraced Cheburashka, a taxonomically ambiguous cartoon character with enormous ears and a gentle disposition.In a culture that relentlessly hammered home grandiose themes like patriotism, socialism or war, the four short Cheburashka stop-motion animated films, the first of which appeared in 1969, were an oasis of innocent delight. The titular hero and his best friend, a pipe-smoking crocodile named Gena, engaged in benevolent adventures. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cheburashka was one of the bygone era’s few symbols that people found worth preserving.”

The piece explores the culture war appropriation of Cheburashka :

“The dispute began several weeks before the movie opened, when Andrei M. Makarov, a member of Russia’s lower parliamentary chamber, the Duma, said he believed Cheburashka to be Jewish. He reached that conclusion — which he aired during a budget hearing that dealt partly with toys — because in the 1969 cartoon, Cheburashka is discovered in a crate of oranges, which the Soviet Union for a time imported from Israel. Mr. Makarov may have been joking. But a familiar brand of Russian anti-Semitism also seemed to be at work.

It describes the wicked anti-Cheburashka campaign being waged by the Russian fascist philosopher and all-around lunatic “Eurasianist” Alexander Dugin. If ever there were a straightforward case of a peddler of unabashed malignancy and evil attacking something innocent and pure, this is incontrovertibly that instance. Do you believe in good and evil, dear reader?
For my own part, I first realized that Cheburashka was the very epitome of excellence when I saw cute Japanese hipster girls wearing t shirts emblazoned with his visage on the Tokyo subway.

Have at it Cheburashka!

Feel free to all in Ukrainian drone air support strikes if need be… !

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The Russians are returning to the Venice Biennale in 2026.

The Russians are returning to the Venice Biennale in 2026.

This is of course a total and unambiguous shande.

The Venice Biennale is thus set to become the latest battleground in the Russian war against Ukraine this year. The Russian pavilion had been cancelled since the spring of 2022 in response to Putin’s full-scale invasion. That decision had seemed to have had near universal support.

However, the new Italian Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco is intent on bringing the Russians back in from the cultural cold (sorry…. I could not resist, comrades). The Italian minister of culture is deeply set against the Russian participation but also seems unable to bypass the Biennale’s bylaws. Venice’s mayor Luigi Brugnaro has announced that direct Russian propaganda will not be tolerated in the Arsenale - making the spurious case that Venice must remain a “forum for dialogue” and that “the Russian people are not the Russian state.” The Russian pavilion has announced a safe program of folklore and music, as well as a lengthy program devoted to the work of the Orthodox priest and philosopher Pavel Florensky, who was executed during the Great Terror in 1937.

The decision has caused tremendous -and entirely correct - international backlash and criticism. At least twenty-two nations have signed up for a boycott and the European Union has already threatened to withdraw at least a portion of its funding.

I myself have signed one of the petitions of artists and intellectuals calling on the Italian government to prevent this travesty, as Ukrainian artists are being killed at the front lines by Russian drones and snipers.

“The European Commission will terminate or suspend funding to ​Venice’s Biennale art exhibition if ‌organisers proceed with plans to allow Russia to reopen its pavilion at this ​year’s edition” reaffirmed the EU ​Commission spokesperson on Thursday.

Even more insane is the fact that the Russian pavilion is set to feature a group exhibition that is organized by Smart Art, an art company that was co-founded by Ekaterina Vinokurova (the daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov) and her friend Anastasia Karneeva (the daughter of a former high ranking KGB/FSB official). Not only is the pavilion making its return - it is doing so in style with curatorial work of the comely daughters of Russian regime Chekists!

The Sunday Times had a proper headline to describe the situation: “Daughters of Putin’s henchmen lead Russia’s return to Venice Biennale”

Rest assured that I will be writing about this issue a great deal in the near future…

Me (left), Sean Penn and his third wife (actress Leila George) in Warsaw in early April 2022 and we were about to see some American intel officials agents for a pivotal scene in Superpower ….

Sean Penn has been garlanded with his third Oscar over the weekend.

Penn took Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the over the top/sadist Col. Steven Lockjaw in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”. He plays Lockjaw with the requisite intensity…. To the extent that I care about who gets which awards, Penn surely deserves his third Oscar (Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson and Ingrid Bergman have also won three).

It should be said however that “One Battle After Another” is a truly muddled and subpar film that had been graced with some excellent actors. As well as extremely competent cinematography.

In his review, my friend Curtis Yarvin (yes- I adore him as a friend and as a character- even if some people will unsubscribe reading that - I do disagree with some of his views - and he knows it- and anyway he just went around taking photos with Alex Soros last week!) referred to that preening ideological mess of a film as “may be the worst movie ever mad”.

“It is a grand, multifaceted masterpiece of badness. It is dramatically bad, morally bad, historically bad and even erotically bad. And to cram in all this badness, it is an hour too long. But you won’t be bored – it is even entertainingly bad. This film is so bad that most people will think it is good, and it will probably make a lot of money. Proving only that America is the kingdom of Cain. But we knew that.”

It is certainly a grandiloquent judgment - which I reproduce here for the simple reason that I have no interest in rendering my own.

Penn skipped the Oscar award ceremony and went to Ukraine instead.

I had the privilege of working as a producer on Superpower, Sean Penn’s documentary (2023) about Zelensky and the war, during the opening days of the full-scale invasion. The night before the war began - February 24, 2022 - I organized a crucial scene in which Penn had dinner and drinks with myself and three other journalists at the Kyiv Hyatt Hotel.

Watch our movie:

Though he has surely made mistakes of political judgment over the years (who amongst us has not?), Penn is an exceedingly serious person. He goes to extreme/complex places, attempts to understand them completely on the ground, and does so through emotional and spiritual antenna rather than ideological priors. He talks to people and feels what they say intensely and deeply.

As a mentor of mine once told me — “he’s by far the most impressive man of his generation in Hollywood.”

Spending time with Penn at the start of the war — serving as his interpreter with Ukrainian officials and generals — was one of the great adventures of my life. However, I do have both legal and moral impediments to saying too much about working on a serious film with a movie star. For the record he was very kind to me. I will say only that Penn is an extraordinarily intense fellow — as of course am I(!) — and that spending time with him is very much akin to being a Greek hero temporarily hobnobbing with Zeus.

What other movie star of his generation would choose to spend his victorious Oscar night with President Zelensky instead of on the red carpet?

He has done a tremendous amount for Ukraine.

For this he deserves our eternal gratitude and respect.

Bar scene in Warsaw with Sean Penn, and a bunch of American spooks in a cigar bar!

(Page from my Daybook - gauche paint over sacred text).

Two weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure of attending a tremendously generative and rambunctious debate on the (possible) convergence of artificial intelligence and Jewish mysticism.

We all know that the Jewish intellectual tradition is rooted in interpretive and hermeneutic methods of parsing texts. In both its mystical and everyday legalistic forms, the tradition focuses on rigorous interpretation - that is on extracting moral parables and ethical teachings from literary language. At the core of the tradition’s pursuit of the sublime is the disciplined practice of analyzing scripture and secondary texts to discern the grammar of reality and being. Likewise, those same techniques of careful semantic and grammatical analysis undergird the architecture of artificial intelligence. Minds rigorously trained in the art of textual interpretation -and a people forged in the pursuit of the divine through the legalistic skill of asking the right questions - may very well be exquisitely sensitive to the gap between scholarly learning and mysticism. Which raises many questions, some of which I had to leave out of my essay…

(Is Judaism a uniquely “Promethean” religion among the world’s faiths? Are Jews—carriers of a deeply eschatological tradition of messianic longing -culturally predisposed to adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence? Is the Jewish yearning for omniscience offer a fleeting glimpse of the master blue print of the “mind” of a possible AGI?)

Our host was the former Worldcoin CEO and tech thinker Max Novendstern. He turned out to be an elegant, charming, and intellectually very serious gentleman whom I have come to like very much. Unlike (sadly) too many of the elites and aristocracy of the tech world, Novendstern truly is an aristocrat of the spirit—a man who understands the need to bring the new tech world to the old humanism, and vice versa.

The dialogue brought together the Harvard University psychologist Stephen Kosslyn and the Orthodox Futurist Rabbi Asher Crispe.

Rabbi Crispe was a total trip - and I personally stand ready to follow him (and the white rabbit) down most any mystical rabbit hole….

I wrote about the issues at stake for First Things magazine.

Here is a video of the introductory remarks from the event:

Here is the First Things essay in full:

What is the proper spiritual posture from which to ask questions of a machine? Might formulating clever LLM prompts condition how we ask questions about, and put questions to, God? Are Jews—rigorously trained in iterative and dialectical reflections—uniquely prepared to adapt to the rise of AI? Can reading the Talmud teach us to be better programmers of the human soul? Or will the advent of AGI end human creativity? Is anticipation for the imminence of AGI similar to our longing for the Messiah?

A few weeks ago, a hundred or so young Jewish professionals, Yale alumni, and tech futurists gathered in the palatial Tribeca loft of former Worldcoin CEO and tech thinker Max Novendstern to seek answers to these and similarly improbable questions. The event, “AI and Jewish Mysticism,” was organized by Rachel Bitutsky, an alumna of Shabtai, the Yale-affiliated Jewish leadership society, and Shabtai’s Rabbi Shmully Hecht. The atmosphere was gracious and collegial, and the dialogue refreshingly outlandish.

Novendstern moderated a conversation between Stephen Kosslyn, the eminent Harvard University psychologist, and the Orthodox futurist rabbi Asher Crispe. The Jewish tradition of parsing religious texts, the panelists held, is similar to the architecture of learning machines trained to consume and synthesize seemingly infinite libraries of text. With a wry smile, Novendstern informed us early in the evening that he believes “actually existing AGI has a lot to do with the Jews!”

Kosslyn spoke in the manner of a skilled educator, proffering insights into the neurological and psychiatric implications of AI. He compared its usage to the grafting of a prosthetic onto the body. The structures of human perception, he argued, were already built into the architecture of AI; thus AI should eventually be able to do everything that human beings can. He concluded with a pragmatic argument that the Torah constitutes a body of self-sufficient knowledge.

Rabbi Crispe, on the other hand, led us straight into the mystical dimension. He synthesized a medley of references to classic Jewish texts with modern philosophy, duly invoking Lacan, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Saul Kripke’s modal logic. The rabbi playfully compared Kabbalah to the matter replicator in Star Trek (both create solid meaning out of thin air), and posited that Jewishness represented a refinement of adaptive algorithms. He riffed on the etymology of Hebrew concepts in order to “hybridize meanings to the next levels of polysemy.” It was like listening to a bizarro version of a Derrida who had attended rabbinical school only to become a tech theorist. At one point, a friend turned to me and praised the rabbi’s performance: He was either a genius futurist or a loquacious con artist in the tradition of Paul de Man.

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Much of the debate focused on the advent of AGI, its implications for human society, and concerns about human-AI hybridization. “If you could give your child a pill that gave them a 2,000 IQ,” Novendstern asked, “would they still be considered human, worthy of the moral concern we afford to normal children? Either way, would you give your child the pill?”

Kosslyn was skeptical of mankind’s capacity to contain the robots after we had given them sentience. “The AIs will not necessarily want to be our slaves indefinitely,” he mused. He proposed “the idea of humans being found throughout the loop, where we become one energy—a synergy between the AI and us that goes back and forth.” He was likely alluding to Douglas Hofstadter’s thesis that human consciousness is a “strange loop,” in which the “I” of subjective conscious experience shapes the physical substrate of neurons from which it emerges. Accordingly, the ideal accommodation with AI would involve humans and AI each constituting the other in a feedback loop of mutuality.

Rabbi Crispe and Prof. Kosslyn disagreed on the core metaphysical question of whether AI could transcend its synthetic origins. They agreed, however, on the necessity of programming the AI to practice “epistemic humility.” Naturally, that impulse militates against the intentions of singularity-obsessed leaders of major AI companies. Here was a deeply Talmudic problem: Can epistemic humility be practiced by an artificial superintelligence created to be effectively omniscient? And if so, how might that humility be conferred to the individual human user, who may privilege ease and comfort even when it guarantees his obsolescence? Kosslyn’s view was that “many human professions will be replaced by AI. Yet AI will never be able to replace humanity.”

Rabbi Crispe questioned what it might mean for AI to exhibit signs of epistemic humility. He related this to Nietzsche’s critique of the “Immaculate perception.” Nietzsche employed the term to ridicule Enlightenment thinkers who chased pure, disinterested objectivity—the “view from nowhere.” Knowledge is inherently personal and, for humans, embodied, inextricable from desire. For machines to simulate human knowing, with its concomitant humility, they would need to make a metaphysical leap, acquiring bodily knowledge. It is impossible to imagine a machine “knowing” anything in the way that Adam had “known” Eve.

Despite their voluminous learning, neither Kosslyn nor Rabbi Crispe identified the Kabbalistic elephant in the room: the irreducibility of consciousness to physical causes. This is not the place to reproduce complex arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind, or to ponder “What is it like to be a robot bat?” Suffice it to say that it is no longer tenable for honest, informed thinkers to affirm purely materialist explanations for mind and consciousness. Ironically, given the evening’s concern with Jewish mysticism, a deeper appreciation for Kabbalah would have precluded such errors. The Kabbalistic worldview understands all reality, even inanimate matter, as emanating from, and unfolding within, the light of divine consciousness (Ein Sof). As such, even the silicon atoms of an AI’s processors are filled with divine light. This, it turns out, is the only way AI could bear even a semblance of consciousness—as one of the furthest emanations of Ein Sof, matter ennobled by and subordinate to human creativity. Unfortunately, the panelists didn’t tread here, even as they avoided numerous New Age-y pitfalls.

As my friend and I left the event, we met a Chilean professor of psychiatry from Yale who researches the effects of psychedelics on schizophrenia. He was impressed with the panelists’ insights into how to extract better responses to theoretical questions by iterating prompts with ever-greater precision. The evening had left him with a burning question: “Could AI teach us the secret name of God?”

With all due epistemic humility, I’ll venture a fittingly Kabbalistic answer: Yes, because we already possess it within ourselves.

Summer 2022 - This was me reporting from a battle zone in southern Ukraine. The commanding General of the Southern Front -Major General Andrii Kovalchuk took me along on his rounds through the southern Kherson region. This was before the Ukrainian counter offensive in the south. This was my dispatch from spending a few days with the general.

Four years ago - the Russian army launched the “special military operation” which intended to bring the Ukrainian state to heel in three day days.

The Zelensky government decided to stay and fight rather than to escape to Lviv or to form a government in exile outside the country. I still retain tremendous respect for the way that Zelensky comported himself in that moment (as does the majority of the Ukrainian population despite also being well aware of his various flaws and shortcomings).

It is easy to forget in retrospect that the Russian assault plan was deadly serious and very much could have succeeded. The Russian logistical issues, lack of manpower and overestimation of their own strength as well as the fierce resistance of the Ukrainian population turned the time. Yet matters could very easily have gone the other way.

The battle of Kyiv really was a sort of providential 50/50 coin toss event.

Zelensky with his heroic composure and skillful international diplomacy likely saved the state in that first critical month.

(Me and Zelensky in 2019 in Kyiv — when we were still fresh-faced young men.)

Four years later, the Ukrainian state has not been broken, with the Russians recently making only tactical gains - at utterly grotesque human cost to their troops. The negotiations which the Trump administration is backing to the hilt have been unproductive so far.

I spent the first year of the war reporting extensively all around the country.

Four years ago tonight I was called at 2 in the morning by a spy friend who told me that the location where I was staying was about to be swamped by Russian paratroopers.

I got in a taxi and left Kyiv as part of a diplomatic convoy of evacuating European diplomats. My career as a war correspondent would begin that day.

I was still a Russian citizen at the time. I had not yet burned my passport (I inherited the citizenship from my father because we lived in Moscow for two years in 1989–91 while we waited for exit visas to America). As I am a native Russian speaker and make tell-tale mistakes in Ukrainian, I assumed that I would be shot by whoever picked me up. A lot of random people were being shot at the time. The Ukrainians had opened up the armories and panicked men were running around with guns killing both real and imagined Russian saboteurs and spies. There was plenty of both. I imagined that I would be in equal trouble with the Russian troops (at a filtration camp) or with the panicked Ukrainian territorial defense guards (at a block post). A senior Azov officer would later jokingly inform me that — at his checkpoint — he would have shot me on general principle for my pronunciation of the Ukrainian “h” sound. I left Kyiv to report from the Belarus border, thinking (correctly, as it turned out) that I would be able to see the Russians from behind Ukrainian lines. I evacuated my own family a week and a half later and returned to report for the next year through the Moldovan border.

I will write more about the anniversary and the state of the war in the days to come.

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This was my first dispatch of the war.

It appeared in Tablet Magazine on the 24th of February 2022.

I wrote it in the basement of a hotel in a town 40 miles from Kyiv, before moving to the south of the country.

My Last 24 Hours in Kyiv

The 24 hours leading up to Vladimir Putin’s invasion were disquieting in their combination of surrealism and tedium. The population of Kyiv was clearly deeply anxious, either engaging in seemingly over-the-top preparations for war (every cable news network reported on some little babushka learning to shoot an automatic rifle) or else ignoring it completely. Ukrainians in the capital were oblivious and stoic in the effortlessly graceful manner of men and women who have authentically embraced fatalism.

Along with my fellow Ukraine hand Nolan Peterson—a tall, avuncular, strapping, former combat pilot who is a real life version of Captain America— I wound up spending the eve of the war with the American actor Sean Penn over whiskey, vodka, and cigarettes. Penn was in good form and told us a story about meeting a young President Putin along with Jack Nicholson in a dacha near Moscow. I can confirm that hanging out with Sean Penn was also the last thing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did before the invasion began.

My memory of that night, before war advanced ever farther into Europe, is of an utterly bored international press corps continuing to imbibe copious amounts of spirits in Kyiv’s finest dining establishments, waiting for something to happen.

For my own part, camped out in the Hyatt Hotel, I wrote in the mornings, and spent time in the banya in the afternoon. I would run on the treadmill in the basement gym and watch BBC live feeds being shot on the floor above me. Nikolay Karabinovych, my friend from Odessa and the creator of the conceptual art movement Neue Judische Kunst, called me as I was trying to sweat out the toxins from the drinking bout of the previous evening. Everyone at the time was discussing the existence of supposed “kill lists” that the Russian army was ordered to carry out against dissidents and civil society types.

Karabinovych wanted to know if I knew anything about these lists—a European diplomat had called him to say that his embassy suspected he might be on them. Given my affiliations with the Atlantic Council and Tablet, had I heard if I was also on the kill list?

“Now that you mention it,” I replied. “Probably.”

For his part, Karabinovych was delighted to learn that the head of security at my suburban safe house, which a wealthy acquaintance had let me use in the event of a Russian incursion, was a Jew (and a former army officer).

“Wow, I didn’t even know they made Jewish bodyguards!” he marveled. “I always knew you were a star, but a Jewish bodyguard!”

I reminded him that the Ukrainian defense minister until late last year was a gent from Lviv with the oh-so Jewish surname of Reznikov.

Eight hours before the first missiles would be launched, and the first Russian battle tanks would cross the swampy frontier between Ukraine and Belarus, I met another friend, a Jewish political consultant, for a quick coffee. The affable and easy-going gentleman is from the occupied city of Donetsk. He had become an internally displaced person in 2014, when his home town was taken over by Russian-led separatist forces. The evening was giving him the same wretched, unheimlich feeling that he had also felt right before Igor Girkin, a Russian FSB officer who enjoys dressing up as a Russian Civil War general, had initiated the war in Eastern Ukraine.

“I have a gut feeling that Russia will actually launch a new hot war in Ukraine,” he said. “I have decided to move my kids away from Kyiv, to take them to Western Ukraine before coming back to Kyiv. I have no other place to flee. In my family we have three generations, one after another, that had to flee, because of the war. It started with my grandparents who had to leave during the Holocaust and continued with my parents fleeing the Russian occupation of Donetsk in 2014. And now I am still running with my kids. I never expected that I would have such experiences. And yet I do.”

He then told me the story of his two grandmothers, one Russian and the other Jewish, who had both refused to leave their apartments in Donetsk. He is less concerned about his Jewish grandmother, however, who at 94 years old has serious hearing issues.

“Not hearing the explosions from the shelling next to the city center and the airport is good,” he told me with an amused smile. “Being deaf, she remains calm!”

The other grandmother spends her days watching Russian propaganda television and also reading the Ukrainian news on the iPad that he had taught her to use in her late 70s.

I finished off that fateful evening at dinner with my fantastically eccentric and hilariously profane Ukrainian American banker friend. The high-end Italian restaurant we dined at was packed with well-dressed Ukrainian elites. I had the octopus and rice pilaf. He had a bowl of linguini. The waiter informed us that in the previous weeks the restaurant had seen business slightly increase. The war had not started yet, and my companion was reminiscing about the many love affairs he had as a young banker in 1990s Moscow, though I am still skeptical of his story about Britney Spears and a small bag of coke. By the end of the dinner I had begun to receive texts and phone calls, some from friends who would have the information to speak with authority, instructing me to leave Kyiv.

These messages became more and more insistent. As our taxis arrived in the parking lot, my friend and I exchanged escape plans and embraced.

Sadly, grotesquely, the pleasures of civilized life in Kyiv have now been sundered by the paranoid fantasies and hatreds of a single man. It seems obviously clear that spending time in the banya, making weirdo Yiddish art, and reminiscing on past love affairs belong to a quality of life that Kyiv will not enjoy again for a very long time.