Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
In Moscow, the events in Ukraine were seen as a textbook example of the popular overthrow of a kleptocratic ruler that could be duplicated in Russia. The regime in Ukraine was almost identical to what had been created in Russia, with the sole difference being that Ukraine, with a nationalist west and center and a pro-Russian east, was more pluralistic. Under these circumstances, it was essential to the Russian leadership that the Ukrainian revolution be discredited. The regime chose the method traditionally used to distract the Russian population from their rulers’ abuses. They started a war. On February 22, the day after Yanukovych fled Kiev, Russia began planning a special operation to seize the Crimean peninsula, which had been transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev. In an interview for a documentary, Homeward Bound, produced by state-run Channel One television to mark the first anniversary of the annexation, Putin said he had made the decision at 7 AM after an all-night emergency meeting with his security chiefs on the crisis in Ukraine. He said he told his colleagues to begin working “to bring Crimea back to Russia.”52 On the night of February 26, 120 well-trained and armed men wearing no identifying insignias seized the Crimean regional parliament building in Simferopol and raised the Russian flag over it. They also set up checkpoints in strategic locations. There was no resistance because the Ukrainian leadership feared an armed conflict could serve as a pretext for an invasion, not only of Crimea but of the entire country. With the parliament building seized, Crimean deputies on February 27 voted to dismiss the government and appointed a new prime minister, Serhiy Askyonov, a veteran of the Crimean criminal world otherwise known as “Goblin.”
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl famously described it this way: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”15
The Mindful Athlete
George Mumford and Phil Jackson
I took Michelle to dinner in Port Washington and she told me about her husband, Mike Lunden, an energy broker who loved bow ties and cigars and hockey and weddings and Chicago and fine wines—and her. She described their courtship and happy marriage. Though they lived in a studio apartment with a newborn baby, she said, they never once got sick of each other. As Michelle talked I noticed that she was yet another graduate of the Publicans Storytelling Academy. She had me laughing one minute, swallowing a lump in my throat the next. She asked about me. Had I gotten married? I told her I’d come close once or twice, but I’d had some growing up to do first. Also, it had taken me a long time to get over my first love. “Right,” she said. “What ever happened to—?” “Sidney.” I cleared my throat. “She phoned me out of the blue when she heard I was at Harvard. We met for dinner.” “And?” “She was exactly the same.” “And?” “I’d changed.” Sidney had explained, carefully and honestly, her decision not to choose me years before, saying she’d been apprehensive about a young man so enthralled by a bar. I told Michelle I thought Sidney had been right to be apprehensive. After dinner I took Michelle for a nightcap to the site of the old Publicans. We sat in the booth nearest the door and I could see Michelle’s spirits lift, ever so slightly, as good memories drifted back. But her thoughts quickly returned to her husband. He was such a good man, she told me, repeating those words, “a good man,” several times. And he was thrilled about Matthew, she said. Now Matthew would know Mike only through letters and photos and stories. She worried about her son growing up with no father, how that void would define him. “At least he’ll have his uncles,” she said with a sigh. “And his cousins. He’s crazy about his cousins. And in school he’ll know many other children who lost fathers, so he won’t feel—different.” I slumped against the back of the booth. It hadn’t hit me until then. Manhasset, where I’d once felt like the only boy without a father, was now a town full of fatherless children.
The Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise