Fearless Woman Warrior Stands Up to Putin’s Oppression

Fearless Woman Warrior Stands Up to Putin's Oppression by @andrewdkaufman #putin #women #warrior

On March 8, to mark International Women’s Day, Putin gave a speech extolling the virtues of women: “You cope with a great pile of problems and worries while all the while remaining charming and beautiful,” he gushed to his mostly female audience. “How can one not simply admire this?” Promising government support to those who…

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The Art of Swimming in the Great Sea of Sadness

The Art of Swimming in the Great Sea of Sadness by @andrewdkaufman #swimming #sadness #ukraine #israel

Words have failed me in recent months. As a Jew and a human, I experience the horrific bloodshed in Israel as a firehose of tragedy so overwhelming that I can’t seem to catch my breath long enough to say anything meaningful at all. Then there’s the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, tame by comparison, as if…

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The Humane Russia I Love, The Brutal Russia I Hate

The Humane Russia I Love, The Brutal Russia I Hate by @andrewdkaufman #russia #culture #life

As someone who’s dedicated much of my professional life to studying Russian literature and culture, I’m following the tragic war in Ukraine with great interest and sadness. It is teaching me lessons both personal and political: how dictatorships work, how bullies maintain their grip on power, how leaders’ deep inferiority complexes often masquerade as superiority…

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How Loss And Struggle Can Lead To New Insights

How Loss And Struggle Can Lead To New Insights via @andrewdkaufman #loss #struggle #insights #newyear

Loss and Struggle At the beginning of December, I finally got the total hip replacement I’d been avoiding. All that was left of my right hip for the past few years was a pile of jagged spurs and dead bone rubbing excruciatingly against one another like a constant, throbbing toothache in my leg that a…

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This is How Gratitude in a Broken World Looks

This is How Gratitude in a Broken World Looks by @andrewdkaufman #gratitude #life #gunviolence

  Tragedy Strikes A few weeks ago, on Monday, November 14, I woke up to the news that three students at the University of Virginia, where I teach–Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry–had been murdered and two others wounded the night before by another UVa student who opened fire inside a charter bus…

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