It’s been two years since Russia invaded Ukraine
This week marks the two-year anniversary of the War in Ukraine. If you don’t have a personal connection to the situation on the ground, it can be easy to scan headlines and lose sight of those at the center of this crisis. You can know, for example, that the Senate just approved a $95 billion emergency aid package to arm Ukrainians (bringing the total U.S. investment to over $170 billion, around 20% of its total military budget). But that won’t tell you much about life in Ukraine.
To understand the human perspective on this topic, I suggest browsing Anton Kutselyk’s Medium posts. Kutselyk is a Medium curator and writer living in Kyiv who’s been publishing weekly dispatches on everything from air raid alerts during movie screenings to reading Sally Rooney novels to the opening of a new bookstore in Kyiv (truly a testament to humans’ ability to create under even the worst circumstances). It’s a view into the war you won’t see elsewhere. Kutselyk writes:
When we don’t die, we lose life experience. We miss travelling and experiencing new things that enrich our lives and make them more interesting. We miss being able to see our parents, sisters and brothers. We miss music festivals and any other public events. We miss getting to appointments and meetings on time. We miss doctor visits. We miss metro trains. We miss hours because of air raid alerts. We miss having choices. We miss fun. We miss quiet. We miss peace. We miss life.
Are you in Ukraine, or do you know someone there? Share your story on Medium.
What else we’re reading
- Today is the 33rd birthday of Python, the programming language used by over 15 million developers worldwide. Even if you’re not a developer, the Zen of Python contains koans that are relevant to anyone building things. For example: Explicit is better than implicit. That’s true of code as well as communication, especially on a team.
- Mark Manson, author of the “Fuck Yes or No” law of dating, reveals an overlooked truth that holds people back from finding ‘the one’: Everyone wants to find a perfect partner, but few people want to be a perfect partner.
- Mat Zucker, whose mother recently passed away, envisions grief not as five stages but as three rooms. Each room holds space for Zucker to view his grief from a new angle (through his own eyes, those of his mother, or those of his mother’s friends). If you’re going through something tough, visualize it as a physical space in your mind. Create a three-dimensional imaginary container for your experiences and emotions. Doing so can help you, as Zucker writes, “be an active participant in this sorrow versus a passive victim.”
From the archive
Four years ago, a panel of academics and literary critics teamed up with Medium publication ZORA to create The ZORA Canon — a list of the 100 greatest books ever written by African American women. The list spans 160 years from pre-emancipation to the present, beginning with the first published works written by African American women in the 1800s, and ending with Morgan Parker’s poetry collection Magical Negro. Browse the full list (also available as a checklist from one responder who committed to reading them all!).
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