I think I used to keep my apartment very clean when I lived alone — now half a lifetime ago, when I was 18. It was under 700 square feet. I recall cleaning it every weekend, top to bottom, and being pleased with the results. I spent half my time outside the apartment between commuting to work and work itself. Often, I didn’t cook for myself. There was a mall food court across the parking lot. One big serving from Flaming Wok could keep me fed a full day, split across three meals.

Of course I could keep it clean. Simplicity, low-mess, and limited space is easy to clean. It was important in such a dingy old apartment; it would have fast become bleak otherwise.

At no other point in my life have I been as tidy. At best, I can keep one room in my house clean. Of course, now my house is almost three thousand square feet. I spend all of my time here. So does my eldest, our cats, and two dogs. There is also a younger kid (who is sometimes at school) and a spouse (who is sometimes at work) and a sibling (who is pretty self-contained).

I grew up in a family where my mom felt obligated to keep things clean-clean. Although my siblings and I were expected to contribute to specific chores (like dishes or garbage), my mom did everything else, and took care of us too. It meant I didn’t learn how to deep clean from her. But I expected my spaces to be as clean as though I had a self-conscious mom around doing all the work.

Expectations and reality have not aligned for me in a long time.

Yesterday I spent a while cleaning — mostly the downstairs floors, some counters. It feels like I did nothing at all. The work was nice for my body though. My mood is better when I spend a bunch of time hauling things around and trying to keep stuff tidy, even if I don’t really dent the big-family ADHD chaos. Most of my publishing peers hire cleaners. I’ve never been comfortable having strangers in the house, nor do I like the way big households call for maintenance labor that is too-low-paid. But I also can’t afford a proper household employee anymore.

So here I am, always feeling lacking, never quite doing enough, and mostly just shrugging it off. We’re not hoarders. We’re just not organized…or sterile. Should homes be sterile? If I have little mammal friends, is it realistic to think I should be able to eat off the floor the way my high school friend’s mom expected?

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Al Jazeera English: How US police are co-opting a law meant to protect victims of crime. A young pregnant woman was shot and killed by two police officers.

Nadine’s anguish was compounded when she discovered that officials considered there to be three possible victims in the deadly incident: Young plus the two cops.

That allowed the officer who fired the fatal shot to invoke a state measure called Marsy’s Law, designed to conceal the identities of crime victims.

Criminal justice advocates, however, warn this is part of a dangerous trend in the United States, where police officers use Marsy’s Law to shield themselves from public scrutiny.

“They were saying he was a victim?” Nadine asked incredulously. “He was the man with the gun.”

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NPR: Pricier Easter bunnies and eggs. Half-dipped Kit Kats. What’s up with chocolate?

Spoiler alert: It’s climate change. We’ve known this is coming for a while.

The world is facing the biggest deficit of cocoa in decades. Most cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, where extreme weather and changing climate patterns have upended crop harvests, which are forecast to fall short for the third year in a row.

That means another year of higher prices for makers, sellers and, ultimately, eaters of chocolate. Chocolate bunnies and eggs are expected to be pricier this Easter and perhaps for some time to come.

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From the Guardian: Punxsutawney Phil and his partner Phyllis (omg cute) have unexpectedly had two baby groundhogs (OMG CUTE!).

“When we went in to feed them their fresh fruits and vegetables, we found Phyllis with two little baby groundhogs. It was very unexpected, we had no idea that she was pregnant,” Dunkel said, adding that the club has not had a baby groundhog in over a century.

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BookRiot: How Public Libraries Are Targeted Right Now — It’s Not “Just” Books

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Balloon Juice: The Many Tragedies of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse

I’m excerpting an excerpt here, but this is the main thing I learned from this post.

The six victims of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse were all immigrants from Mexico and Central America, doing the kind of grueling work that many immigrants take on, when a container ship crashed into a support pillar at 1:30 a.m. EDT on Tuesday (0530 GMT) and sent them plunging into the icy Patapsco River.

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In heart-refilling “news,” Smithsonian Mag has videos of parrots learning to play games on tablet using their tongues. Eeee!

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NPR shares a cool picture of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This is using polarized light, and the article compares trying to photograph Sagittarius A to taking a picture of a donut on the Moon from Earth.

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Semaglutide products are famously expensive. I’ve heard around $1000 USD per dose. It’s made insurers reluctant to cover it for weight loss (Ars Technica), and then it made producers get the drug approved for weight loss to limit risk of heart attacks and whatnot (NPR).

Now we’re learning that it costs about $5 to make a single dose. (Quartz) Which means basically that the makers are wringing money out of us through insurers. Fun. Sounds like a pretty normal American medical industry scam.

I’m ready for it to be warm enough to put my plants outside. The amount of mealybugs I have is obnoxious, and there’s no better treatment than popping them out back to get eaten by predatory bugs. I was just looking at old posts on my Facebook, and I said this exact same thing last year. I don’t think I needed to release more predatory insects indoors; I seem to recall making it through to summer last year. Of course, my memory is crap, so what do I know?

I promised myself I’d stop talking about my New Sober Life because going on and on about withdrawal is an extremely boring subject. But. I have been having rather strong anxiety the last couple weeks in fits and starts. My psychiatrist recommended I focus on improving my diet and exercise, and of course that is something I must do too; I’ve gotten very out-of-shape.

But I think it’s also a side-effect of the withdrawal, based upon what I see in MJ recovery groups. I’m only (“only”) two months into sobriety. It’s fairly early, all things considered. I’m looking at a year-long withdrawal process (for reals!). 2024 is just gonna involve spurts of anxiety, periods of feeling stoned (like the last couple days tbh), and brainfog making me dreadfully forgetful.

On the bright side, I do continue working a bit, and I hope I can keep at it. I am having a very hard time focusing on worky stuff but the desire is there, if not necessarily willpower or energy. I Want To Get Better.

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I used to hate the Abrams-spawned Trek movies, but the distance of time has given me fondness for them. I really like Chris Pine as Kirk. The fandom specific to those movies is endearing. Also, it’s easier to swallow “wrong” Trek when Trek has continued since. It was hard to accept those shallow, action-oriented Trek films when it felt like a rejection of most everything Trek had been until then, and I feared we would never get more of the Trek I like. We have gotten plenty more good Trek since.

So it’s with that in mind that I continue watching NuTrek 4 development with curiosity. There’s a new writer attached. (Variety)

It’s been awhile since the last movies, and Pine at least is in his Daddy Era, so I’d love if they skewed toward some Star Trek II aging-related plots.

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One study has linked intermittent fasting to heart disease-related deaths. (Smithsonian Mag) I used to spend a lot of time in diet circles, and what they would say in defense of IF is this: the study is self-reported, and self-reported diet studies don’t mean very much in isolation. This looked at people for eight years, and doesn’t seem to have controlled for lifestyle or many other factors. It doesn’t seem they even looked at whether people were fasting willingly or if it was brought about by other circumstances. You really have to wait for meta studies to draw conclusions.

In diet circles, IF is regarded as a health panacea. They’ll point out that everyone does some degree of IF, since (almost?) nobody eats overnight when they’re sleeping, and that feast/famine is a “natural” eating pattern for humans. I’ve become increasingly skeptical of all the dietary magic bullets. I’m willing to believe it’s more dangerous than anyone says. I already think most restrictive diet patterns like keto and IF are less likely to be suitable for people with estrogen-driven hormone systems.

Generally the best advice that seems to persist through the ages: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

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I really can’t just link every Psyche.co article, but I always enjoy the read. This one is about ways to think about time.

We’re stuck with the past. But you can dress it up in different ways. Often, what happened in the past is affected in the future because ‘what happened’ depends on how things turn out. Whether some past purchase was a lucrative investment decision depends on what happens to the investment after the decision. Even if you reasoned really well, if your prediction didn’t pan out, you lose the money. If you met someone for a coffee and it turns out that this was the first meeting of the relationship that defines your life, then the coffee was a different kind of event than of a coffee meeting that leads nowhere and has no later significance. This needn’t be a failure of knowledge on your part. Whether or not it counts as a significant event in your life might hinge on how things go subsequently. There may be no clues that you can spot at the time. So there you are, sitting in a café, nervously reading an online magazine, unaware of the significance of the event you are waiting for – because there is no fact yet!

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Senator Ava Burch of Arizona did a brave thing: she announced both her pregnancy and abortion simultaneously on the Senate floor. (NPR) Hers was medically necessary due to a tragically unviable fetus. She’s had a lengthy history of miscarriage. Her story is one that more people find sympathetic, but she stands in defense of everyone’s abortion.

“I don’t think people should have to justify their abortions,” Burch, a Democrat, told the chamber.

“But I’m choosing to talk about why I made this decision, because I want us to be able to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world,” she said, in reference to the state’s 15-week abortion ban, passed in 2022. […]

Burch, who is also a nurse practitioner, says the current law requires her provider to give a list of “absolute disinformation” as well as what Burch describes as an “unnecessary” ultrasound, plus counseling designed to change the minds of patients with viable pregnancies.

“I was told that I could choose adoption; I was told that I could choose parenting, which were two things that I couldn’t choose,” Burch said. “And it was cruel to suggest that that was an option for me when it’s not.”

Disinformation surrounding abortions is law in many places, and it’s simply cruel for the government to be involved in medical decisions like these. It’s the definition of personal.

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Puerto Rico is having an outbreak of dengue. Cows in Texas and Kansas have bird flu. (Ars Technica)

I always think about how often I’ve heard that increased epidemics are going to be one of the hardest-hitting effects of climate change. I don’t know if that’s a factor here, but…I think about it.

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Scientists want parts of the Moon protected from private interests so that it can be used for scientific purposes instead. (Smithsonian Mag) I extremely do not like humans more aggressively marking off bits of our beloved space-rock for any reason, but I suppose scientific research is preferable.

Me: I’m going to post more SRF for a while!

Also me: doesn’t post at all

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For whatever reason, my kids are in a “play in the back yard” mood again. The weather isn’t especially good for it. We had warmer days the other week. Yet it’s been this week, with the random spurts of hail, where they want to be outside a lot. I love when they play outside, honestly. I have so many warm associations with working in my office with the windows thrown open so I can hear them giggling and shouting.

We’ve been in this house a decade now. The house we lived in when Little Sunshine was born. Moonlight has gone from three to thirteen here. I’ve enjoyed a lot of springtime play with my kids giggling and shouting outside my open windows.

A decade is the longest I’ve lived anywhere. Even the house where I did most of my growing up, I was there for something like nine years. Sometimes it’s strange because it makes the whole decade feel brief. But it’s also a kind of stability I don’t take for granted. It’s a big house in a nice neighborhood (too “nice” if you ask me), and we could be “stuck” somewhere vastly less pleasant.

For a decade, I’ve wandered the trails, acquainted myself with neighborhood dogs, and ignored how much my house needs repainting. I’ve gone through so many phases here. The whole pandemic.

A lifetime, really.

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In Canada, a kindly fellow tried to take care of abandoned cats during the pandemic. (The Guardian) He ended up with over 300. Although he had to ask a charity for help, the cats were all apparently very well cared for, in great health, and super friendly. Hopefully they can find homes for everyone. This emphasizes the importance of fixing cats, which can breed like…uh, rabbits? He probably couldn’t afford it, but that’s why we let charities handle it. They can get lower-cost assistance and donors.

Anyway, the guy meant well, and he asked for help — so he won’t be facing any legal action.

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X-Men 97 got a massive number of views in its first week of release. Disney says this is their biggest new animated show ever. (Variety)

I hadn’t intended to watch X-Men 97. I’m pretty over it with all things Disney. But I heard some tantalizing spoilers about the show — it seems to be following some of Claremont’s 80s soap opera-styled X-Men stories — so I gave it a shot. I loved it. I’m looking forward to more. I guess I’m not done with Disney, but the poorly written crap.

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In ongoing AI creep news, Google is going to return AI-generated results to people who didn’t opt in. (Engadget) Given the accuracy of AI (spoilers: AI LLMs aren’t designed to be accurate and aren’t capable of evaluating accuracy), this is a continuing disaster on information across the internet. I already switched to Duck Duck Go completely just so I can actually find meaningful things.

SAG-AFTRA ratified a three-year contract limiting the use of AI voices in animated television, though. (Variety)

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Something like 2.7 million folks in the UK are too sick for work or pursuing education. (The Guardian) Covid is a mass-disabling event, and we usually don’t talk about it that way. We need to.

It comes as Rishi Sunak comes under growing pressure from within Conservative ranks to “get a grip on worklessness” after a dramatic increase in economic inactivity over the past four years to more than 9 million people.

People with long-term sickness do not contribute to the official unemployment rate, which has fallen to 3.9% among those aged 16 years and over – equivalent to 1.4 million people – among the lowest levels since the mid-1970s.

However, economic inactivity has increased from 20.5% of all working-age adults to 21.8% – equivalent to 700,000 people – with little sign of slowing as the impact of the Covid pandemic on the jobs market recedes.

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The United States didn’t veto a ceasefire resolution at the UN. (AJE) Since we’re allies with Israel, who don’t want a ceasefire, this is noteworthy. Netanyahu abruptly cancelled a visit with Biden when he learned the USA planned to abstain. (WaPo)

But Hamas didn’t go for the ceasefire either; they insist on Israeli troops withdrawing. (Reuters)

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Here’s another article about a church trying to help the homeless and the government saying “absofuckinglutely not.” (NPR)

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Did someone say all-woman secret society? (Smithsonian)

Howe’s mindset on feminism was clear: “We intend simply to be ourselves,” she once said, “not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.”

Many of the women in Heterodoxy moved in corresponding circles and maintained similar beliefs. They were “veterans of social reform efforts,” writes Scutts in Hotbed, and they belonged to “leagues, associations, societies and organizations of all stripes.” A large number were public figures—influential lawyers, journalists, playwrights or physicians, some of whom were the only women in their fields—and often had their names in the papers for the work they were performing. Many members were also involved in a wide variety of women’s rights issues, from promoting the use of birth control to advocating for immigrant mothers.

Heterodoxy met every other Saturday to discuss such issues and see how members might collaborate and cultivate networks of reform.

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money talk about the rule of law and how it could be worse in America. It could be better too. Some perspective is interesting, though.

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Colbert apologized for joking about Kate, Will, and Rose. (Variety) It’s been eye-rolling to see how discourse has switched to saying these were all attacks against Kate herself, and how much people are going along with it. Although there was an intensification of speculation in the period before the announcement from all sorts of directions, the initial point was that Kate’s disappearance was alarming with the royal family’s history of mistreating women. I mean, if we assume that all the stuff they’re saying now is 100% true, the Firm still threw Kate (you know, the mum with cancer) under the bus for a PR disaster that massively damaged credibility. They had so many options to not do any of that. And now focusing on how everyone is being so mean to Kate, they’re using her illness to distract from the bad behavior of the firm. So it’s business as usual, I guess.

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Poor Flaco. The cost of his freedom from a zoo was getting poisoned by New York City’s rats and pigeons. RIP. (The Guardian)

It’s been something like nine weeks since I became sober-sober (rather than California sober) and I’m starting to feel pretty normal. It comes and goes, but I think I feel normal more often than I don’t.

I’m progressing on one of my outstanding publishing projects, Fated for Firelizards. I’d hoped to get back to publishing chapters at the end of February, but now it’s looking more like April. I’m getting there, though. Theoretically I could publish a chapter this week, but I’m not confident I’d have the next chapters in time for all the remaining weeks, so I’m just waiting until it’s done-done to get back to publishing.

Making any progress at a time when my kids are around me *constantly* is impressive on two fronts. I can only work on a porny project when I’m away from them, for one. Being able to mark out time for myself is difficult but I’m doing it little bits at a time. It’s also impressive because normally unpredictable schedules wreck me, and my little guy has been sick.

I think I’m probably going to get back to Atop the Trees after this and try to put out a finished project, if only to get it off my plate for a while. I still wanna do a sequel. I don’t really care about the publishing status of the first one anymore.

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The first dude in the UK is going to prison for sending unsolicited dick pics to people, including a 15yo girl. (WaPo) Gotta say, if all the guys who sent unsolicited dicks to me when I was underage (and everyone underage I knew) were going to jail, jails would be stuffed full of guys with ugly dicks.

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Nations meant to be supporting Ukraine are still importing Russian titanium for aerospace uses. (WaPo)

Roughly 15,000 tons of titanium worth $370 million were exported by VSMPO in 2022, the vast majority of it sent to Western nations that supported Ukraine, according to the export database, with Germany, France, the United States and Britain topping the list. VSMPO, which essentially is a monopoly in Russia, then exported at least $345 million in titanium in 2023, according to more-limited data for that year seen by The Post. […]

In a statement, Boeing said it now “sources titanium predominantly in the U.S.”

Major suppliers for Boeing have continued purchasing Russian titanium, however.

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The Yurok will be managing 125 acres of their land alongside the National Park Service. (The Guardian) That is a small portion of the land that was taken from the Yurok by American colonizers in the 1800s, but it’s an unprecedented return of land management. We will not see more of this if the American election changes presidential leadership this year.

Reparative efforts remain so important. As one example of ongoing difficulties, there is a rapid rise in congenital syphilis connected to poor prenatal care available to Native nations. (NPR) It’s hitting other populations too, but not as dramatically.

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Anime classic The End of Evangelion has returned to theaters. Here’s an interesting read on what differentiates it from other mech suit stories. (Gretchen Felker-Martin on Patreon)

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Morels are one of the most coveted edible mushrooms found in gourmet foods. An outbreak of sickness (with two deaths) in Montana was connected to eating sushi rolls with morels in them. (Ars Technica) Some of the symptoms sound like what happens when you just eat raw mushrooms. The chitin isn’t digestible by humans. Simply eating raw mushies in volume can cause diarrhea and vomiting like that. But that doesn’t sound like the only factor at hand here. They’re having a hard time figuring out exactly what happened.

I was kinda surprise the morels were sourced from China. I don’t know much about the mushroom economy, but I know that American foragers often sell directly to restaurants too. America has a hard time scaling our consumption to what we can actually produce, and this doesn’t exclude mushrooms, I guess.

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Washington Post has an article about former President Trump’s relationship with age-related mental issues. He’s been quite scared of it since his father got Alzheimer’s. Now he’s using it like a political cudgel against Biden.

Trump’s father’s condition also drove a wedge into his family, which fell into years of lawsuits that alleged in part that Donald Trump sought to take advantage of his father’s dementia to wrest control of the family estate — litigation that introduced reams of medical records detailing Fred Trump Sr.’s condition.

[…]

Trump arranged for a lawyer to write an amendment called a codicil giving him control over the estate and to protect his inheritance from creditors. He then had two of his father’s most trusted associates deliver it to Fred Trump Sr. as if it were a formality. But Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, forbade Trump’s father from signing it immediately. Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, later said in a deposition that her father didn’t like how the effort to change the will was being done “behind his back.”

I’m not surprised to hear of his attempts at elder abuse. This man has always been deeply screwed up, loveless, without loyalty. It feels like a bit of a coda to that phase of his life to try weaponizing it against his opponent.

This article seems likely published because Trump’s father’s condition was heritable, and cognitive function remains a major issue in the election.

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BookRiot shares ten urban fantasy series to read. I don’t know about “fresh” exactly (it’s advertising InCryptid and The Hollows, which are two quite old series) but there’s some recs in there that look good!

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money notes that perception of crime is high as ever, while actual crime rates are low as ever.

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He’s not unproblematic, but Ewan McGregor has a good point about the function of intimacy coordinators. (Variety) It’s not just about an actor’s comfort and safety. In the case of McGregor and his wife performing together, he points out that it helps with the comfort of the entire crew. There’s a lotta people impacted by filming s

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The American federal government is trying to ban menthol in nicotine products. The tobacco industry is responding by making a simulated menthol that feels the same to consumers while skirting the law’s letter. (NPR) Bans like these have a real, marked effect on consumption of nicotine. My citation on this is totally apocryphal though. I know that flavor bans and federal laws limiting how nicotine is distributed was a major influence on how quickly I quit smoking myself. I have heard from others that it impacts them too. When you consider this industry makes all its money off addiction, it’s hard to see their efforts as anything but preying upon addicts (though addicts feel well-served by efforts to keep their fav flavors in stock).

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The Justice Department is going after Apple for their walled garden. (Engadget) I will need to be convinced this is a good idea. I like my Apple products specifically for the walled garden. You pay a premium in part because you will have a very predictable experience with the hardware and software. The versatility of other platforms has, in my experience, meant instability, vulnerability, and loads of headaches.

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Musk’s TSFKA Twitter banned accounts that named Stonetoss (Ars Technica), a notorious Neo-Nazi comic artist. It seems like Stonetoss is reluctant for everyone to know that he is Hans Kristian Graebener from Spring, Texas. Not just a Neo-Nazi, but one who doesn’t want to actually have his face and name beside his hateful works. No surprise Flanmunk was on his side. “Freedom of speech for me, not for thee” or however it goes.

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Talk about guts: A filmmaker in Russia released a very successful adaptation of The Master and Margarita, which is a criticism of authoritarianism. Putin doesn’t seem to like it very much. (Vanity Fair) Art persists.