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The only way out of suffering, as Robert Frost said, is through it. We don’t run away from the bull, we take it by the horns. Because ultimately, we perform at our best when we’re not suffering, so we all have a vested interest in committing to a journey of self-discovery, no matter how challenging or uncomfortable it makes us.
The Mindful Athlete
George Mumford and Phil Jackson
$234 Billion Twelve years earlier, in the late evening of September 13, 2006, a 41-year-old man named Andrei Kozlov, the chairman of Russia’s Central Bank and one of a handful of honest Russian officials, had just finished a friendly soccer match with other regulators at Spartak Stadium in Moscow. As he made his way to his car in the parking lot, two armed men approached him and his driver and opened fire. Both Kozlov and his driver were struck multiple times. The driver died instantly, but Kozlov, who was hit in the head, chest, and stomach, initially survived. He was taken by EMTs to Moscow Hospital No. 33, where he died on the operating table. He was survived by his wife and three young children. Three months earlier, Kozlov had traveled to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to meet with that country’s chief financial regulator. Kozlov had identified a major money laundering scheme originating in Russia and flowing through Sampo Bank in Tallinn, and he wanted help in putting a stop to it. The Estonians heard him out, but did nothing. The money laundering continued unabated. Five months after Kozlov’s assassination, Sampo Bank was acquired by a larger bank from another country. Danske Bank. This was the same branch of the same bank that would end up laundering $200 million connected to the Magnitsky case, as well as the $8.3 billion that Eva and Michael would eventually expose in their reporting. Not long after the Helsinki Summit, in September 2018, Danske Bank finally published the findings of their audit. It quantified the actual volume of dirty money that had flowed out of Russia and the former Soviet Union through this Estonian branch over a 10-year period. The amount was $234 billion! That’s right. $234 billion. This was 28 times greater than Berlingske’s figure, and more than 1,000 times greater than the $200 million we’d identified. This shook Danske Bank to its core. Between 2017, when Eva and Michael started reporting on it, and 2019, one year after the audit, Danske Bank lost 65 percent of its market value; its CEO, Thomas Borgen, along with most of senior management, was forced to resign;I and a major criminal investigation was finally opened in Denmark.
Freezing Order
Bill Browder
On the most basic level, bad sentences make bad books. Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
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