Moscow’s Hybrid War
For the Kremlin, controlling Montenegro is an opportunity to have its own proxy in NATO. For Belgrade, it’s a chance to regain the territory, which declared independence in June 2006.(...)
Russia After the Arab Spring
In 2015, I moved to Moscow to spend a year teaching human rights. I lasted five months. As my former students from that time are arrested for protesting the Ukrainian war, here are some reflections on what I learned about the evil of Putin and the kindness of Russians.(...)
Utopia by the Sea
The Russians have struck Odesa again, this time mere hours after reaching a deal with the Ukrainians. Though spared the worst of the war, an attack on Odesa is an attack on the best of Ukrainian and Russophone culture alike.(...)
Reconsidering Susan Sontag, Part II
Even as Susan Sontag’s celebrity has dimmed, the time she spent in battered Sarajevo in the 1990s, directing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot remains a touchstone in discussions of intellectual engagement.(...)
Eighty Years of Resistance
Montenegro is a study in contrasts: a proudly traditional culture that adopts the latest technology and trends with ease; a rugged, mountainous topology that drops dramatically to the gentle Adriatic Sea via modern highways and old, winding roads; and a climate of baking dry heat in the summer, turning to cooling rain and snow-topped peaks in the winter. (...)
Susan Sontag’s War
When Zdravko Grebo, a legal scholar at the University of Sarajevo, died this year, it seemed to many Sarajevans the end of an era: the last of his generation, of dissident, socialist anti-fundamentalist Bosnian thinkers who embodied the best of Yugoslav dynamism and spoke to the hope – as Sarajevo has often stood for – that Europe can carve out a space between totalitarianism and late capitalism alike.(...)