What I’ve Taken — No. 4
A recruitment pipeline to the front lines, a middle class that was policy before it was identity, and a songwriter who traded lyrics for a loom.
‘Given a Gun and Sent to Die’: Kenyans Lured to Fight for Russia in Ukraine
NPR
A man in Kisii County, Kenya, flew to Russia after being promised a job as a driver. He signed a contract in a language he couldn’t read. Weeks later, his family learned he was dead from a television broadcast. More than a thousand Kenyans have been recruited this way — promised skilled work, handed a weapon, given nine days of training and sent to the front lines. Compensation for the dead is available only to Russian citizens. The question of whose bodies are expendable has always had an answer. It just changes depending on who needs soldiers.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
HBO
The trailer dropped last week and it’s everywhere. I’m a millennial, so I grew up with these movies — and I didn’t expect to feel anything watching an 11-year-old I’ve never seen before walk through Platform 9¾. But here we are. The Succession showrunner is running it. The Game of Thrones director is behind the camera. The actors have signed 10-year contracts. The most expensive bet in entertainment right now is a story an entire generation already knows by heart. That says something about what we’re willing to pay to feel like we did when we were kids.
I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?
The American middle class wasn’t a natural outcome of hard work. It was a policy project — built by the GI Bill, union protections, public universities, and a tax code that funded all of it. Then every piece of that bundle was unbundled and repriced. Hanna Horvath names what’s left: two groups living inside the same squeeze at different price points. One can’t afford the basics. The other can’t afford the life they were trained to expect. Neither is accumulating capital.
OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora
TechCrunch
Six months ago, Sora was the future of video. Disney committed a billion dollars. Downloads topped three million. This week, OpenAI killed it. The app was burning through an estimated $15 million a day in computing costs and earned $2.1 million in its entire lifetime. The Disney deal dissolved before a single dollar changed hands. Impressive demos are not products. And the inherited Silicon Valley belief that hype and demand are the same thing just lost another argument.
The Zombie Regulator
The New Yorker
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau returned $21 billion to Americans and recovered $5 billion in penalties from banks and tech companies. Now its employees are paid to sit at their desks and do nothing. One examiner copy-pasted the same line into her weekly accomplishments email for months: “I did not violate Director Vought’s stop-work order.” The agency built to protect people from financial ruin is being dismantled by people who were never supposed to run it.
Lay It Down
Hazlitt
John Samson Fellows — the Weakerthans’ frontman, once called the prairie poet voice of his generation — has stopped making music. He was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and hospitalized. Now he weaves on a loom in his Winnipeg basement, makes small fabric pieces, and gives them to people he loves. He converted to Quakerism and rewrites hymns to sing at protests. “Everything dies,” he said. “We’re upset by change and by things dying and passing away, but sometimes they really need to.”
What Happened When I Began to Speak Welsh
The Yale Review
At his grandmother’s funeral, the service was in Welsh. Her first language. His mother’s too. He didn’t understand a word. Years later, he opened Duolingo and started trying to learn the language his family carried for generations — the same language the British government once punished children for speaking in school. He may never be fluent. The essay isn’t about fluency. It’s about what it feels like to reach for something your family was forced to let go of, and find it still there, just barely.
Why Minneapolis Continues to Stand Up Against ICE
ProPublica
A ProPublica journalist photographed the people in his own Minneapolis neighborhood who stepped up after ICE arrived. A 64-year-old cancer survivor patrols with a whistle. A cafe owner organizes rides for her staff. A pastor’s church has fed thousands. One neighbor put it simply: “Legal immigration, illegal immigration? That’s not my call. That’s not my fight. By the time you’re my neighbor, you’re my neighbor.”
