Glass instantiates a perpetual newness and eternal currency. Unlike seemingly more solid materials like steel-reinforced concrete, which unmaintained will rust away to ruin in five hundred years, glass is stable, unless it’s shattered. Perhaps because glass shows no patina, no material evidence of its past, it is the closest thing we have to a material from the future.
A synchronous account of the war in Ukraine, then, would begin on February 24, 2022, with the invasion, and in 2014, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine. It would take in Ukraine’s tumultuous post-Soviet transition, the movement in Maidan, and the 2008 NATO summit in Romania, when George W. Bush pressed for NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia and also NATO’s absorption of the Visegrád Group and intervention in Yugoslavia.
I was still shaking. “I never felt so angry,” I said. “Never ever. I want to club him to death like a baby seal. Just take a lead pipe or a baseball bat and smash him all over.”
We’d known about one another for years but had never met. Only a handful of people like us in this world, we matched on Tinder. One of our mutual friends told me that his ex-wife had a restraining order against him. I said, “Sounds passionate.”
Disorder in the courts! Three years with the Atlanta forest defenders. Nausicaa Renner on losing a mother and becoming a mother. New fiction by Nell Zink, Paul Soto, Walter Siti, and Bela Shayevich. The Eighties take over the reviews section.