Russia, Dao, Bees, Stage, Vietnam

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Fighting Russia, Arming Ukraine

Anatole Lieven | Responsible Statecraft | 23rd March 2021

The new Cold War, updated. "A tacit agreement has been reached between NATO and Russia: NATO will not defend any non-NATO country that Russia might actually attack, and Russia will not attack any country that NATO might actually defend". But rivalrous flashpoints remain, such as Transdniestr. If Moldova and Ukraine try to blockade Transdniestr, Russia will go to war, and win (1,120 words)

The Dao Of Daos

Packy McCormick | Not Boring | 22nd March 2021

If you passed up a chance to buy Bitcoin when it was thirty cents, and only heard about NFTs after the $69 million sale at Christie's, you may now be wondering what comes next. The answer may well be DAOs, and here is an accessible guide for the general reader. In brief: A DAO is "a group organized around a mission that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain" (6,500 words)

Why Bumblebees Love Cats

Stefan Mancuso | Longreads | 23rd March 2021

Just-so tales from the world of evolution. "Mice are among the principal enemies of bumblebees. They eat their larvae and destroy their nests. On the other hand, as everyone knows, mice are the favorite prey of cats. One consequence of this is that, in proximity to those villages with the most cats, one finds fewer mice and more bumblebees. So far so clear? Good, let’s go on" (3,300 words)

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Audio Of The Week: On Stage

Episode: "Hamlet's 'Advice To The Players' With Randall Duk Kim And Annie Occhiogrosso" | Podcast: The Working Actor's Journey | 22m08s

Practical advice podcast in which experienced actors share their wisdom with the next generation in their industry. This is a short episode, extracted from a longer conversation elsewhere on the feed. It focuses in on a particular text: the monologue from Hamlet in which the hero gives advice to the actors he has hired. "Let your own discretion be your tutor," he says, and the experts here speak to the necessity for actors to hone their own sense of discretion — an instinct and judgement to what each moment of a play needs (22m08s)

Book Of The Week: On the Ho Chi Minh Trail

by Sherry Buchanan | Courtesy of Five Books

Stories from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the legendary 10,000 mile network used by the North Vietnamese to supply the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Sixty thousand ‘Youth Volunteers’, many of them teenage girls and young women, defused bombs, repaired roads and tunnels, and were critical to victory despite “the mass message that the conflict was primarily a man’s war, pumped-up, vulgar, a telegenic dystopia accompanied by raucous rock ’n’ roll.” (252 pages)

Afterthought:
"The worse the villain, the better the film"
— Alfred Hitchcock

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