Shelled out for a month of Claude to see if Claude for Chrome can hold a candle to ChatGPT Atlas. Apparently Claude is marvelous for coding, but I don't do any of that, and Atlas remains far more useful, IMO.
First Meduza newsletter of 2026 is out. Last week, Carnegie Center senior fellow Alexander Baunov wrote a gigantic essay about Putin's path dependence, Europe's naïveté on Russian experts, the Kremlin's overturning of Earth's moral universe. It was a lot. Here's my summary.
i can understand "likes the sound of his own voice," but these tiktoking influencers staring down the barrel of a selfie video ten times a week are something else
Hated back home & in Ukraine, and distrusted in Europe, Russian émigré opposition politics continues to generate insufferable infighting. Leonid Volkov has landed himself in trouble again, this time for celebrating neo-Nazi White Rex's "death" & calling for Yermak, Podolyak, & Budanov to be jailed.
Volkov responded here, admitting that he shouldn't have written so "emotionally" to a disgruntled former colleague, while defending his zero tolerance for neo-Nazis and bigotry against all Russians.
Ramzan Kadyrov has appointed his eldest son, Akhmat, who's only 20, as acting deputy chairman of Chechnya's government. Half his kids and dozens of his relatives have govt jobs. Seems like he's hanging on just long enough to hand it all over to them.
Interesting new project from political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya: "StarkTalk," a platform for connecting Russian and Western experts in a "virtual equivalent of Track 2 discussions." So much communication has broken down since 2022; this initiative makes sense. I wish them luck!
