That thing in Russia last weekend: In the aftermath I find myself imagining Logan Roy Putin saying to Kendall Roy Prigozhin: "I love you, but you are not serious people." Somehow driving an armoured column a thousand kilometres toward the Kremlin, and then saying, "Um, no, I've decided not to." ... There's a certain decisiveness lacking.
On the other hand, the first rule of war -- Don't march on Moscow -- endures.
I may have been among the last people in the world to take to Twitter for news, but last weekend, even in Twitter's degraded state, it was pretty interesting to watch a lot of smart, well-informed people try to interpret history in real time. It seemed to demonstrate mostly that history is smarter than anyone. Nobody came even close to foreseeing the actual outcome. But the video clips were amazing. And I did like the historian Vladislav Zubok, who updated Marx a little to explain the long trend of Russian history: "Tragedy. Farce. Tragedy, Farce. Repeat"
