Blog
Seasonal affective disorder, your days are numbered. The winter solstice is only two days away. 😎
Kyiv Independent video: One night with a Kyiv family amid Russia’s mass attack (29 min)
Am reading a fascinating collection of Ukrainian World War II narratives preserved in family memories and papers: World War II, Uncontrived and Unredacted: Testimonies from Ukraine, edited by Vakhtang Kipiani (Ibidem, 2022).
Finished reading Andrey Kurkov’s Diary of an Invasion (Mountain Leopard Press, 2022) and Our Daily War (Open Borders Press, 2024). Lots of good observations and vignettes about life in Ukraine during war, but also before.
'One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This' by Omar El Akkad
I’ve added Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Penguin, 2025) to my list of books for the current moment. In one sense it’s a fairly short screed about the hypocrisy of Western values. From that point of view, this 2025 winner of the National Book Award had little new to tell me. Moreover, its dark context, the genocide in Gaza and the related suppression of free speech in the United States, led me to put it down several times in recent months. Nonetheless, its unusual and compelling style kept me coming back. On top of that, I was drawn to how he structures his reflections around elements of his own transnational life.
At times, the argument feels bothsidesist, but I don’t think it’s that easy. Besides, why doesn’t Western liberalism work harder to offer a positive vision that lives up to liberal values instead of relying on the adage that the other side is a whole lot worse. It is, but this rhetorical strategy clearly hasn’t worked, and it is irrelevant when it comes to the lives that Netanyahu has extinguished using US weapons. Despite my occasional ambivalence about it, this little book offers anyone who chooses to listen plenty to think about. We can’t overcome the current disorder without doing better in word and deed.
I took this photo before cleaning off the car and moving it for the snowplow last Wednesday.
I signed up for Proton Mail for the email. It was never very good, but lately it’s been getting in my way and even undoing my work. Worse, the company shows no signs of trying to improve the experience. Instead they add things I neither want or need: AI, a crypto wallet, documents…
Capped off a dark, cold day with whole wheat blueberry pancakes and applesauce. Made an octogenarian happy.
It’s snowing.
Windy day. Went most of it without internet, except for what my phone could muster.
Russian Corpses
According to ATESH (Military Movement of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars) on Telegram:
The occupiers are using a meat processing plant in the rear area to store the bodies of Russian soldiers from the Pokrovsk direction.
ATESH agents from among the Russian Armed Forces report that the Russian authorities are using the Mangush meat processing plant for the temporary storage of the bodies of their soldiers.…
Translation via DeepL. Post found via Miriam Rathje’s report today in Tagesspiegel, “Wegen ‘beispielloser Todeszahlen in Pokrowsk’: Russland soll seine toten Soldaten in Fleischverarbeitungsbetrieb lagern."
I forgot to mention that a short edition of Stoneman’s Corner went out on Nov. 19th: Newsletter: Snapshots, Great Depression, Siege Humor.
A new Kyiv Independent documentary, “The War They Play” (65 min), looks at Russia’s criminal reeducation and militarization of children in occupied Ukraine. According to Igor Vorobyov, head of the Warrior Center (for children) in Volgograd Oblast, “If you want to defeat the enemy, raise their children.” (55 min.)
Robin DeRosa has words for a state whose investments in higher education are the lowest per student in the country.
This winter, close to thirty tenured faculty at my regional public university in New Hampshire will “voluntarily” leave their positions…
I am gutted for New Hampshire, and particularly for the North Country, the rural area that my regional college serves. Many of the Pell-eligible, first-generation college students that attend my university are students who, data shows, likely would not go to college at all without our university close to home. Because we “live [tax-free] or die” here in the Granite State, students pay exorbitant costs already to access higher education. And now the budget situation means the closing of many, many majors; the reduction of choice in what careers and passions our students can pursue; the possible consolidation or closure of campuses; and the reduction of student support and library services.
Quoted from “I Lost My Job” (Oct. 19, 2025).
