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The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine | New York Times
A New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
The partnership’s guiding idea was that this close cooperation might allow the Ukrainians to accomplish the unlikeliest of feats — to deliver the invading Russians a crushing blow. And in strike after successful strike in the first chapters of the war — enabled by Ukrainian bravery and dexterity but also Russian incompetence — that underdog ambition increasingly seemed within reach.
Death Row Reverend: Meet the Man Saving Inmate Souls | Rolling Stone
The public pays precious little attention to the majority of death-row inmates; the world only seems to tune in when a celebrity or organization rallies around a convict they deem innocent. Not Hood. No case is too small, or man too beyond forgiveness. “Back when I was growing up, it was all about the Rapture,” he says. “This idea that the world was going to end at any moment — and so there was an urgency. I don’t feel like that anymore, but that urgency is still there. People are dying.”
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Unburying the Remains of the Third Reich | The New York Times
Yet even as the country has sought to avoid reminders of its history, the remains of that past keep turning up — the war graves of 8,000 to 12,000 Germans are uncovered each year. Bones have been uncovered by excavators digging parking garages in German villages and by telephone workers laying fiber-optic cable where battles took place in the 1940s. At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, soldiers outside Kyiv were digging trenches when they came across the skeleton of a man. He was a German soldier who died during the last war fought there, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union some 80 years before.
Complicating matters is the rise of the far right in Europe and around the world. For the first time since World War II, extremist parties have become ascendant across the region, and in places like Italy, Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands, these movements mirror — and in some cases trace their roots directly to — the fascist groups that triggered the war. In Germany, the charge is being led by the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which in February’s snap election became the second-largest party in Parliament, nearly doubling its seats there.
AfD has reshaped the German discourse on issues like immigration and climate change. But it is the party’s approach to the old taboos of the war that have collided most squarely with German norms. AfD leaders now denigrate what they call a “cult of guilt” around how the Nazi past is taught in schools, and they have reached out to figures of the American right for help.
Trump Does Have a Plan. It's North Korea. | Richard Hanania's Newsletter
There’s been a debate about whether the Trump administration has a plan with these tariffs. Officials say contradictory things, and Trump makes impossible demands, like not having a trade deficit with any country in the world while also having low trade barriers. Most smart people believe Trump is just winging it and acting based on instinct, with predictably disastrous results.
Yet to assert Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan misses the essence of this man and what is happening. From the perspective of making the country better off, he obviously doesn’t have one and doesn’t care. But if you imagine Trump as someone who wants to maximize his own personal power and the number of people paying him deference, then massive tariffs do not seem like a bad way to go about achieving his goals.
in search of the blood red sublime | luanqibazao
In Sentimental Education, Arnoux is not presented as especially sympathetic (not that any character in Flaubert’s novels escapes from the author’s cool and ironic judgment); he’s a bit of a fool, oblivious to Frederic’s designs on his wife, frivolous and ineffectual in his pursuit of aesthetic beauty and business success. All of these traits are exemplified by his failed attempt to achieve the “copper-red of the Chinese”. The whole thing is really just a comic sub-subplot.
But in fact, Arnoux was trying to do something very difficult, something that the greatest artisans in the only country in the world capable of producing porcelain at such a high standard took generations to perfect.
And it’s not as if they cracked it one day and solved the problem forever, either. The beautiful copper-red glazes achieved by the “great technical advances of the High Qing” mentioned in the Sotheby’s catalogue were themselves considered lesser imitations of red-glazed porcelain produced in the 1420s and 1430s, and then basically never again.
The red porcelain of the earlyish 15th century Ming dynasty is widely considered the high-water mark of the copper-red glaze. In Chinese it is called xianhong 鮮紅 – “fresh red” or jihong 祭紅 – “ceremonial red”, because the pieces were used as altar vessels. A remarkable feature of these pieces is that they are monochrome. No dragons, no phoenixes, no landscapes, no calligraphy. Just color.
There are just a few dozen surviving examples left.
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There could be billions more people on Earth than previously thought | The Independent
There could be billions more people living on Earth than currently thought, according to a new study which claims rural figures worldwide could be vastly underestimated.
Currently, the UN estimates the world population to be about 8.2 billion, which is projected to peak at over 10 billion by the mid-2080.
However, research, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that rural populations in these estimates could be undercounted anywhere between 53 per cent to 84 per cent over the study period between 1975 and 2010.
Titanic Scan Reveals Ground-Breaking Details of Ship’s Final Hours | BBC News
A detailed analysis of a full-sized digital scan of the Titanic has revealed new insight into the doomed liner's final hours.
The exact 3D replica shows the violence of how the ship ripped in two as it sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912 - 1,500 people lost their lives in the disaster.
The scan provides a new view of a boiler room, confirming eye-witness accounts that engineers worked right to the end to keep the ship's lights on.
And a computer simulation also suggests that punctures in the hull the size of A4 pieces of paper led to the ship's demise.
“Titanic is the last surviving eyewitness to the disaster, and she still has stories to tell,” said Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst.
Manufacturing and Trade | Marginal Revolution
It has become popular in some circles to argue that trade—or, in the more “sophisticated” version, that the dollar’s reserve-currency status—undermines U.S. manufacturing. In reality, there is little support for this claim.
NASA Webb’s Autopsy of Planet Swallowed by Star Yields Surprise | NASA Science
Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb’s observations show the planet’s orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.
“Because this is such a novel event, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,” said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tucson, Arizona. “With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.”
[...]
Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.
“The planet eventually started to graze the star's atmosphere.”
Manufacturing share vs. GDP | Marginal Revolution
