How the war ends
Also: Humans playing god and listening to audiobooks (#413)
Happy to report that we've reached another Friday. As per our deal, I read the entire internet so you don't have to. Oh, and just before we get to this week's recommended links: I've updated the archive. It now contains 2137 recommended links since 2011. A treasure trove of great reads.
1. How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end?
«The war ends when Ukrainian military victories alter Russian political realities, a process which I believe has begun.» This war is too complex and too dynamic to assume that anyone can predict how it will end. However, as Timothy Snyder lays out, it's important that we imagine it. «Our imaginations are trapped by a single and rather unlikely variant of how the war ends: with a nuclear detonation. I think we are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants.» (For more context, I highly recommend Snyder's book «On Tyranny: Updated with Twenty New Lessons from Russia's War on Ukraine»)
Timothy Snyder
2. A New Era of Climate Disasters Revives Calls for Climate Reparations
Staggering numbers: The five biggest greenhouse gas emitters — the US, China, Russia, Brazil, and India — have cost the world $6 trillion in losses, or about 11% of average annual global GDP from 1990-2014. Science is getting better at pinpointing damages and losses related to emissions, the question is: What follows from this knowledge?
3. We tried to build a nuclear fusion reactor
Unlike what the title might suggest, this isn't a YouTube tutorial for building your own fusion reactor. What it is: a good entry-level explainer on fusion, that powerful technology for creating vast amounts of energy — that famously has always been a decade in the future, for a while now.
