It's July 4, so I am not writing a full newsletter this week. It's summer, after all. And  a good time to detox from the Internet. I took a long bike ride yesterday on the Polish side of the Oder, and ignored whatever was happening on social media. (I got blocked on Twitter by Rudy Giuliani this week.) Below, I include some nice links to my work elsewhere and other good stories.

What I do when you’re not looking:

• I work part-time as Social Media Editor for International Politik Quarterly, which offers a Berlin view of foreign affairs, published in English. This week, we released our eighth issue, looking at how Europe has reacted to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There are excellent contributors from Warsaw to Madrid. I have a column analyzing the European public's response to the war in Ukraine, and potentially its E.U. membership.

• I reviewed Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi in The Parliament Magazine. Ypi was born in 1979 and grew up in the isolated Stalinist dictatorship of Albania. She was an enthusiastic communist, and when the regime fell in 1991, her parents told her the truth about her country.  

Short reads:

• Jeff Sharlet has a new book coming out called, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, for which he drove cross country listening for civil war talk. He hears that Ashli Babbitt is a martyr, and whites have become the oppressed minority. The book is excerpted in Vanity Fair. (June 22, 2022)

• A new French documentary by journalist Guy Lagache features a call between President Emmanuel Macron and Russian leader Vladimir Putin before the war with Ukraine. The dialogue is stunning. Putin said the Ukrainian government was not democratically elected, and "They came to power in a bloody coup. People were burned alive, it was a bloodbath. Zelensky is one of those responsible," he says -- bizarrely calling from the gym. [DW, LeTemps (French)]. 

• Ryan Grim of The Intercept has an important piece about how progressive groups are fighting internally over race, gender, and generation, precisely when the U.S. faces threats from right-wing extremism and a would-be autocrat in Donald Trump. It is cleverly titled, "The Elephant in the Zoom." Thomas Edsall expands on and adds to the article in a New York Times column.