A Weird Time to Be Alive…
• A nice essay from Charlie Warzel, writing in The Atlantic – “An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive.” A snippet: “The world witnessed the best and worst of humanity in a single week.”
Don’t Be Like Russia
On Good Friday, Sam Sifton writes in his NYT The Morning newsletter on a story by C.J. Chivers on how Russia weaponized the cold this past winter in their attacks against Ukraine:
“His reporting comes from a residential neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Kyiv called Troieshchyna. Most of the buildings you’ll see there are classic late-Soviet apartment blocks — giant stacks of prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, some rising 15 stories or more above the street. Few have boilers to provide heat. Instead, the Soviet government built centralized thermal plants to supply hot water and heat to dozens, even hundreds, of buildings at a time.
This winter, one of the coldest in Ukraine in close to 20 years, Russian forces used long-range strikes to target those plants, rendering huge swaths of Troieshchyna virtually uninhabitable.
Here’s Chivers:
The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”
Ukrainians called what followed the “kholodomor,” a sort of portmanteau of the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague.” More than 600,000 residents fled the city in search of warmth and safety as Russian drones continued to strike.”
Chivers’s story is here. Don’t be like Russia; stand with Ukraine.
Artemis II
• The live video feed from the Artemis II mission: https://www.youtube.com/live/6RwfNBtepa4
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn:
More Worthwhile Reading
• More worthwhile reading:
First, from the NY Times Editorial Board, Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran:
“There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.
Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.”
And also from the Times, a most excellent essay from Phil Klay: Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran. It’s definitely worth reading.
Acoziborole, a new, more effective treatment for sleeping sickness.
Well, here’s some good news for a change. A new drug, acoziborole, has been approved as a new, single-dose, oral treatment for T.b. gambiense sleeping sickness. More effective against different disease stages and has a much better side effect profile:
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/16/g-s1-113246/sleeping-sickness-drug-treatment-tsetse-fly
https://dndi.org/research-development/portfolio/acoziborole/
Bouie Again Accurate on Trump
• I highly recommend Jamelle Bouie’s latest NYT opinion piece – Is There Method to Trump’s Madness? Excerpt:
“So, again, there is no method to this particular madness. There is no method at all. What there is, instead, is a man with a fourth-rate intellect and a fifth-rate temperament who treats reality as a television show for which he is the cloistered, pampered star. But the world actually exists. Real lives are at stake. And his actions have weight that cannot be easily moved.”
Yes, Still More for Jamelle B.
• Jamelle Bouie again sums things up very accurately in his Feb. 25 NYT What Trump Hath Wrought essay. An excerpt:
“What Trump has, a little more than one year into his second term, is a failed presidency: one that has crashed on the rocks of his ambition to supplant constitutional government with that of his will. Yes, he has done a tremendous amount of damage. And yes, he has degraded American democracy to the point that it is on life support.”
More Government Inflicted Terror on American Streets
From Matt Yglesias’ January 20 Slow Boring, Blame Trump for Trump-era immigration excesses:
“Trump’s surge in enforcement has been accompanied by large-scale racial profiling that’s been blessed by Trump’s appointees on the Supreme Court. They are deliberately surging resources into places controlled by their political opponents rather than places where state and local officials are asking for additional immigration enforcement. They have told ICE personnel that they should cover their faces and wear fatigues rather than maintain the normal appearance of police officers in a democratic society. The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts keep winking at white nationalist memes. In Minneapolis, along with detaining illegal immigrants, they are deliberately arresting Somali-born legal residents and trying to come up with pretexts to strip them of refugee status. And of course, when an officer killed an anti-ICE activist after repeatedly violating protocol and after his colleagues needlessly escalated the situation, the Trump administration responded by characterizing the dead woman as a domestic terrorist.”
All of this is terrible. And all of it is Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s doing (with help from the Supreme Court).
And now ICE has committed yet another brutal, inexcusable murder. R.I.P. Alex Pretti, ICU nurse and model American citizen. None of this would be happening if we had decent, moral leadership and if ICE was operating in a lawful manner (and perhaps operating in states where there are many more illegal immigrants, rather than ones the petulant president likes to goad). And the reprehensible lying about what is transpiring – sickening. As the New York Times Editorial Board said today, “The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.” I am sad and fear for my country.
Jamelle Bouie Again
• Another Jamelle Bouie essay I enjoyed from the NYT – This Is Not How a Normal President Speaks. I especially agree with his notion that John Roberts shares some blame for his role in Trump v. United States, which not only stopped ongoing prosecutions that might have derailed DJT’s election, but has fully empowered his dictatorial presidency. Excerpts:
“Trump is, in his mind, an elected monarch — although not an enlightened one — whose whims are law and whose power extends to every inch of the United States and every corner of the Western Hemisphere…Trump’s assertion of unlimited authority — subject only to his moral judgment and his mind (whatever that means) — is a total rejection of popular sovereignty and the logic of the Constitution…
In Trump v. United States, Roberts and his Republican colleagues anointed the office of the presidency with immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” defined — somewhat vaguely — as anything extending from the president’s “core constitutional powers.” Never mind that this language had no basis in the constitutional text or its drafting and ratification. Never mind that the framers, in fact, seemed to accept the possibility that a president might be criminally prosecuted for actions in office after impeachment and removal…
If the only things Trump thinks can stop him are his own morality and his own mind, our task — at least for those of us who view the state of things with outrage and anger — is to show him the folly of his words.”
You Can’t Handle the Truth
After watching what actually transpired in the horrific shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an as-yet unnamed ICE agent versus the responses from the current administration, I thought that Steve Vladeck, writing in his One First Substack, had a wonderfully fitting quote from Hannah Arendt, who wrote in her 1967 New Yorker essay “Truth and Politics”:
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”
And so it is.