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The Book - Finale // Mera Climb P.2
Nepal, April 2023
The Book - Finale // Mera Climb P.1
Nepal, April 2023
The Book - Safety Third.
Chapter 1.3, Moscow, late 2008.
The Book - Human Pyramid.
Chapter 1.2, Moscow, 2008
Isa - My Chechen Friend
In my childhood, Chechnya was the first real war I had heard of. It was happening as I went to school. Mutilated soldiers were coming home, and we had all sorts of myths about the dangerous Chechen separatists floating around. In 1999, four apartment block bombings across Russia led the ex-FSB director and then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to blame the Chechen separatists and start the second Chechen War. A move that eventually earned him his presidency. There is substantial evidence that th...
Isa - My Chechen Friend
In my childhood, Chechnya was the first real war I had heard of. It was happening as I went to school. Mutilated soldiers were coming home, and we had all sorts of myths about the dangerous Chechen separatists floating around. In 1999, four apartment block bombings across Russia led the ex-FSB director and then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to blame the Chechen separatists and start the second Chechen War. A move that eventually earned him his presidency. There is substantial evidence that th...
Foundation
Imagine you are born in the first years of Soviet Russia. At only three years old, you escape the horror and bloodshed of early empire via a gruelling trip to the USA. Your Jewish parents never teach you Russian, and you grow up working at their news stand while the great depression ravishes the country. You read a lot of sci-fi and study arduously, but before you hit the legal drinking age – the world goes to war. You complete your master's degree in chemistry in 1941 and find yourself ...
Foundation
Imagine you are born in the first years of Soviet Russia. At only three years old, you escape the horror and bloodshed of early empire via a gruelling trip to the USA. Your Jewish parents never teach you Russian, and you grow up working at their news stand while the great depression ravishes the country. You read a lot of sci-fi and study arduously, but before you hit the legal drinking age – the world goes to war. You complete your master's degree in chemistry in 1941 and find yourself ...
Is Freedom a Lack of Responsibility?
I was walking around the late summer Tbilisi the other day. It was my favourite kind of weather - the early autumn onset was showing. Shadows became a little darker, the light a tad warmer, and the temperature dropped to below 70°F (20°C (293°K)), which has the same effect here as in SoCal - people start wearing puffer jackets and avoid going outside. It was a rare occasion for me, too, just walking around central Tbilisi and running small errands with no care in the world. Since I moved here...
Is Freedom a Lack of Responsibility?
I was walking around the late summer Tbilisi the other day. It was my favourite kind of weather - the early autumn onset was showing. Shadows became a little darker, the light a tad warmer, and the temperature dropped to below 70°F (20°C (293°K)), which has the same effect here as in SoCal - people start wearing puffer jackets and avoid going outside. It was a rare occasion for me, too, just walking around central Tbilisi and running small errands with no care in the world. Since I moved here...
Svoboda
Svoboda means freedom in Slavic languages. It's one of those rare words that sounds the same across most of those languages. It is spelled and pronounced similarly in Roman scripts, such as Polish (swoboda) and Czech (svoboda). Moreover, it is spelled the same (свобода) in most Cyrillic languages, such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Russian. However, the precise meanings of freedom and svoboda feel slightly different. In my quest to pinpoint that difference, I dug into the etymologies of sv...
Svoboda
Svoboda means freedom in Slavic languages. It's one of those rare words that sounds the same across most of those languages. It is spelled and pronounced similarly in Roman scripts, such as Polish (swoboda) and Czech (svoboda). Moreover, it is spelled the same (свобода) in most Cyrillic languages, such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Russian. However, the precise meanings of freedom and svoboda feel slightly different. In my quest to pinpoint that difference, I dug into the etymologies of sv...
Election day
I was once an eager student. In my early school years I have worked tirelessly to be the best in class and was often shut down for having too much initiative. Seems ridiculous today, but a statement "we know that you know, let the other students work" was something I heard often. By the time I went to a boarding school I decided to try a different approach of doing as little as I possibly could. I got really good at it, in fact I got so good that I failed the entry exams to my super-competiti...
Election day
I was once an eager student. In my early school years I have worked tirelessly to be the best in class and was often shut down for having too much initiative. Seems ridiculous today, but a statement "we know that you know, let the other students work" was something I heard often. By the time I went to a boarding school I decided to try a different approach of doing as little as I possibly could. I got really good at it, in fact I got so good that I failed the entry exams to my super-competiti...
