Substack Reads: Nikita Petrov, Christene Barberich, and Michael Moore
This week: Love in the time of warfare, a fashion darling takes on her debt; plus, has the crypto tide finally turned?
Welcome to Substack Reads—your weekly drop of the best writing, ideas, and podcasts created right here on Substack.
Every Saturday we’ll send you a roundup of some of the most exciting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work being made by independent writers and artists from around the world.
So sit back, and enjoy!
LIFE AND WAR
“I’m one of the tens of thousands of Russians who left their country since it started a war with Ukraine”
—Nikita Petrov, in Psychopolitica
Nikita Petrov is a Russian artist and writer currently seeking refuge in Armenia. During the first few days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he documented his life through a series of letters to his friend, the writer Glenn Loury.
2/27, Day 4
Glenn, LaJuan, thank you so much for this amount of care and support. I’ll try keeping these updates regular. It would be good for me too, having to keep a record.
We are OK. The situation changes quickly. SWIFT is still working, but it might stop soon (apparently there’s an agreement on disconnecting “some of the banks”). Country after country close their air space for Russian airlines. The Russian authorities continue to say cartoonishly evil things. Putin called on the Ukrainian army to seize power because he’d have “better chances at finding common ground” with them than with “the neo-Nazis and junkies” that make up today’s regime. Medvedev said that Russia being expelled from the Council of Europe (which is one of the many recent news of this sort) is a good excuse to bring back the death penalty. This, as the war itself, sounds eerily similar to the joke from a few years back: “As a retaliation for the Western sanctions, Russia decided to bomb Voronezh.”
We’re looking for ways to leave, hoping we’re not being too slow. I think the most realistic options are either Armenia or Turkey in April. The first priority is just leaving Russia, because this will be getting harder as time goes by, and might become close to impossible fairly soon. Once out, we can start thinking about our next steps.
(I checked in with a couple of friends today, and their attitude is different: one said, “I will be burning in shit, but I’ll stay,” and the other “I don’t want to rush things. If it is my fate to be trapped here, so be it.”)
One good thing that came out of all this is I realized I should stop “waiting for the right moment” and proposed to Karina (she said yes). I made the decision on the first day of war: I thought, first, there’s no time to waste anymore; but second—and I know many of my friends don’t share my sensibility—this actually feels like a perfect moment to me, our private love story set against the backdrop of the horrible drama of history. It’ll be something to share with our kids.
I’ll stop here. Let me know if this is too detailed an update than you wanted.
Thank you again,
Nikita
GROWING UP
My Debt Story
How one woman’s life lesson in money turned out to be a pretty good investment
—Christene Barberich, in A Tiny Apt.
So, here’s what really happened: I moved home and began commuting to work … two hours each way. I woke at 5 a.m. every day and most evenings came home after 8. The cost of commuting even then wasn’t cheap, and thankfully my parents, knowing I was in a terrible spot (and also probably knowing my calculations were completely absurd), didn’t charge me rent. I contributed to groceries and other household incidentals and paid for the gas in the 1987 Plymouth Duster I still had from college. It was a stick shift with a cassette player and no air-conditioning, and I drove it back and forth to the train station as well as to my favorite thrift store in Babylon every Saturday morning. On most Friday nights, I would drive from the train station to my aunt’s house a few towns away from my parents for dinner. And since we were close, we would often talk at length about life, along with my predicament and how ashamed I was, something I had a really hard time sharing with anyone. I was nearing 30. I had no money. I was struggling in a job that was going nowhere. And I was living in the house I grew up in … with my parents. I didn’t date anyone for the entire time I was back home. Mostly because I was exhausted by the grueling schedule of my life, waking so early and going to bed most nights at 11. And also, more accurately, because I couldn’t bear the idea of telling someone I might meet at a bar or out with friends that I had to move back in with my parents. Even imagining it, meeting someone I might actually like, was enough to keep me from going anywhere with anyone.
I remember one Friday night, sitting on my aunt’s living-room floor, worn out, depressed, and angry at myself for being what I thought was such a fuck-up. And my aunt said something I’ve never forgotten: “Sometimes, you have to choose to be happy. You can’t just wait for it … you have to choose it.”
SMALL JOYS
Reasons to Live Through an Apocalypse
Suleika Jaouad has been journaling her life in isolation for the past two years. Here she reflects on what it takes to appreciate life’s smallest joys.
—Suleika Jaouad, in The Isolation Journals
Often these small moments fade from view with the passage of time. What makes it into our memory banks are the bigger things—either the zeniths or the nadirs—but what we end up longing for and leaning on in hard times are the little quotidian comforts and delights; they lift and carry us from day to day. Noting these joys is a muscle I’ve been consciously trying to exercise: training the eye to see them and training the mind to hold onto them.
I do want to make a distinction here between the practice of celebrating small joys and the culture of “toxic positivity,” where we’re told to be ever-grateful, to always search for the silver linings, to put a positive spin on all experiences, even the profoundly tragic. The author Barbara Ehrenreich has written critically about this cultural phenomenon with far more nuance than I can in this missive, but it’s a topic I’ve thought a lot about, especially in these last months. It’s easy to feel pressure to be someone who “suffers well”—grateful and graceful and stoic 24/7. But that doesn’t allow us to exist fully, to experience the full range of the human condition, from happiness to grief, from gratitude to envy.
CRYPTO
The End of Crypto’s “Wild West”?
How the battle to shape the future of cryptocurrency has begun
—Adam Tooze, in Chartbook
China has taken the lead by going a long way towards banning both the use of crypto as a means of payment and bitcoin mining. Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Bolivia, Bangladesh and Nepal have followed China’s lead.
Countries that have restricted the ability of banks to deal with crypto-assets or prohibited their use for payment transactions include Nigeria, Namibia, Colombia, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam and Russia.
In the financial centers of the West, in EU, UK and US, regulators, politicians and lobbyists are jostling to decide what will be the rules of the game.
It seems that we have reached a turning point in the development of the industry. For many this is the end of the “Wild West” phase of crypto’s development. This may mean some restriction of commercial and technical freedom. Will that mean the beginning of the end? The withering away of a speculative bubble? Or will it have the effect of establishing crypto as a recognized part of the financial ecosystem?
HISTORY
Did Adolf Hitler really only have one ball?
And, if so, what influence that might have had on him—and the world
—Guy Walters, in Walt’s World
I had been asked about whether Hitler really did have only one ball in a TV interview the other day, and I must confess that I was stumped, and told them I didn’t know. (Media training tip: If you’re ever asked by an interviewer a question that you cannot answer, just be honest and say, ‘I do not know the answer to your question’. It looks far more confident than blathering some half-remembered facts dredged up from the back of your panicked mind.)
Until today, I had always thought the notion that Hitler only had one ball was just, er, a load of bollocks. How on earth did the British public know about the state of the Führer’s lunchbox? It just couldn’t be true, just as it couldn’t be true that Goebbels—who had six children—had no balls at all.
What I did know was that a supposed autopsy carried out by the Soviets on what they claimed to be Hitler’s charred remains had revealed the following:
Anatomical characteristics of the body:
[…]
c) The left testicle could not be found either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, nor in the small pelvis.At first glance, this seems like it might prove that Hitler was indeed one testicle short.
GREEN FINGERS
The perfect bulb meadow
An award-winning garden designer explains exactly how the Brits do it
—Jo Thompson, in The Gardening Mind
The early- (March), mid- (March-April) and late-flowerers (May) have all decided to go for it at once. A hot March got them all going, the tulips taller this year than last due to the Spring rains necessary for height. Then the weather became cold again, which held suspended everything that had popped into bloom, as if they’d all been put in a fridge.
In a bulb meadow such as this one in this pub garden, this all-at-onceness is an unexpected but absolutely welcome surprise.
Crown imperials, narcissi, anemone and tulips dot along and through this meadow—here, I mean ‘meadow’ in the sense that a mix of plants are allowed to grow and flower. I’ll experiment with perennials in this way too, shaking things up and letting it all hang out, not controlling, instead simply providing the space and occasionally helping out where necessary.
The pick of colours is key, and as shown by a year such as this one, it’s a good idea to bank on nothing and everything: take a look at your list when you’re making it in October, and imagine a picture of everything in flower all at once. If this image ‘works’, go for it. If there’s one variety that you think is a bit of a gamble, drop it. Make a note of it, and include it next time with something else.
Don’t be scared of untidy baby leaves and spots of bare earth. The plants which follow on from the early meadow also need their space to emerge and then breathe, so bits of brown soil here and there are completely fine. You’re allowed to have a bit of untidiness in your garden: take it from me, this way you manage your stress levels (one thing from the to-do list gets shifted to the not-to-do list), the invertebrates will thank you, and the hedgehogs will almost throw you a party in gratitude.
Include some showstoppers, some flamboyant attention-grabbers who may look slightly ridiculous in the catalogue but whose exotic forms can look strangely at home against more usual forms in exotic colours.
POETRY
Birthday poem
—Michael Moore, in his newsletter
Great days are gone
Great days are ahead
Trying times are here
Better days are not dead.Truth has been told
And truth has disappeared
We fight now to come home
The path I wish was more clear.I once believed I came from somewhere
And then I realized that this was nowhere
Until I heard a Beatle say, “If you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will get you there.”I found the key
that found the door
It opened so wide
I was finally inside
And so were all of you.Better days were here
Better days just might come true.
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost with writer Hannah Ray and editor Farrah Storr.
Got a Substack post to recommend?Tell us about it in the comments.
You don't know what you did!! Now I am expecting Saturdays in order to find new golden peeps. I agree with Julie, this is absolutely better than Twitter. Sorry for Elon.
Finally catching up here. Such great content - juicy and meaty! Thank you