At War With Russians At War

An interview with filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova

“What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men?” Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1863. “What force made men act so?”

These were no new question, Tolstoy admitted. “These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and tradition of [the past].”

His predecessors, Hegel and Nietzsche, were convinced that great men and world spirits moved history. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace as a rejection of these grandiose theories.

“What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the collective will of the people transferred to one person,” Tolstoy wrote. For him, the interesting question was why people entrusted this power to a single person, and why they tolerated it being wielded in their name. “Power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”

Anastasia Trofimova armed herself with a similar question when she set off for occupied Eastern Ukraine in early 2023, intent on joining a battalion of Russian forces heading to war. For seven months, she watched these men head to the frontlines and watched their corpses return.

The record of her journey, Russians At War, sparked enormous controversy when it was cancelled, then screened, at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. I saw the film amid the fracas. I reviewed the film and interviewed Trofimova for for The Toronto Star: While this is not the grotesque propaganda film some made it out to be, it suffers from a profound lack of curiosity.

As she explained to me, her mission as documentarian was to understand the pawns and not the grandmaster. In so doing, she invoked War and Peace: “Is there a place where [Tolstoy] should say: Well, down with the tsar?” She told me. “No, they're giving you a picture of people who were caught up in this completely tragic historical whirlwind.”

Having never read War and Peace — and not being ready to read all 1,225 pages for this week’s dispatch — I turned to Tolstoy’s second epilogue and found it so much more curious about the relationship between power and subject than its derivative work would suggest. Tolstoy writes of how “this relation of the men who command to those they command is what constitutes the essence of the conception called power.” Trofimova might care for the commanded, but she cares very little about those who command.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: A conversation with the director of Russians At War about the conflict, the art of the documentary film, and what the West gets wrong about Putin.

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A couple of editorial notes, up top: One is that this interview was conducted with the plan that it would be synthesized into a column, not broadcast in full — so there are multiple spots where Trofimova makes claims that I think are factually untrue or worth challenging. But for the sake of time, I just let them go. I tried to hyperlink corrections where possible. That said, I do think the conversation is pretty fascinating, and I genuinely enjoyed hearing Trofimova’s point of view. Paying subscribers can access the audio of the conversation further down in the post.

The other note is probably only relevant to the Canadians and/or Canadaland listeners. If that’s not you, just skip to the next section.

On Canadaland’s Short Cuts today, on which I was filling-in as host alongside my guest Paris Marx, we had a fascinating chat about the enshittification potential of generative AI, as well as Russians At War, which I highly recommend. We also talked about the war in Gaza.

Unfortunately, the show was edited over my objections and I feel the need to highlight it. Yesterday evening — after the show had passed a fact check — publisher Jesse Brown decided to impose some unusual and fairly sweeping cuts to our conversation about weapon sales to Israel. I objected to these cuts and Jesse relented on some. But he insisted on two cuts to Marx’s comments: One, which noted how Western weapon sales are offensive as Israel “continues to bomb Gaza and kill so many people”; two, that Israel is engaging “in what many people are claiming is a genocide against the people of Gaza.”

Jesse claimed the comments were too vague. I think that is obviously untrue. Jesse’s decision to remove them, particularly over my objections, is an editorial over-step and, I think, made because he simply disagrees with the allegations. Cutting the phrases robbed Paris’ comments of their intention, which is a significant editorial mistake. The line was re-recorded and added back in after the episode was posted, but the damage is done.

I absolutely despise the deluge of hate, often veering into antisemitism, that Jesse gets. But I also don’t believe Canadaland is a free and neutral place to discuss this issue in particular, given that Jesse — as publisher and owner — frequently imposes his editorial line on others’ work. (A little addendum: Karyn Pugliese, the Editor-in-Chief, was on leave when this all went down.)

My position on the war and the allegation of genocide is, at this point, fairly clear. (Dispatches #74, #76, #77, #78, #82, #101, #109) But as I wrote recently, we are making this debate more difficult and vitriolic by aggressively policing each other’s speech, and I think that’s what’s happening here. I certainly respect Jesse’s position on the conflict, and the deleterious knock-on effects here in North America, but I don’t respect his willingness to let his personal beliefs cloud his editorial judgement.

So, in keeping with my relatively long tradition of quitting gigs on matters of principle, I’ll be ending my recurring hosting gig at Canadaland.

Anyway, on to the interview.

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Let’s jump right in. I just finished watching the film. Certainly provocative and interesting — I have a lot of thoughts. But let's start with some of the backlash to it. What's the past couple of weeks been like?¹

Anastasia Trofimova: Well, I mean, it's been a bit of a roller coaster. As a Canadian, I wanted to bring a story to Canada first and foremost. A story that pretty much no one has seen before, because no one really was able to get this type of access. At the same time, I understand that some people, especially from the Ukrainian community, might have found it to be a very sensitive topic. And I fully empathize. Because I understand when people lose someone, it's incredibly hard — and you want to lash out at someone, at anyone, because you feel pain. But, at the same time, to lash out at a film that they have not seen, which is an anti-war film, because it shows the horrors of war?

Despite the fog of war, it's still as awful and as tragic for both sides as pretty much any war that we get to examine after the fact. But now we're getting to examine while it's still going on.

So, it's been a roller coaster. I would never have thought that we would have the Deputy Prime Minister repeating the words of a Ukrainian official and hinting that this film should not be shown. This was completely unexpected because she has not seen the film. So she just repeated the comments of a foreign diplomat instead of protecting Canadian artists. And the ripple effect — we see that TVO has suddenly pulled out, even though we were always in touch with them for the last two and a half years while we were making this film.

It feels like, perhaps, the protests were empowered by her [Freeland's] words to take it up a notch and to use threats of violence.

Censoring the film doesn't strike me as a very useful avenue. But the one thing that I think many have seized on: Are you able to say categorically, across the board that — I know you received at least tacit approval from the local commanders — but have you had any other sanction, cooperation, even tacit or hinted acceptance from Russian officials at any point in time during the filming or subsequently-

I can say explicitly, unflinchingly, 100% — whatever other adjectives you want to use — that I have not received any support, any permission or anything of the sort from the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Russian authorities, or any other Russian state organization, including RT Documentary and all its affiliates. I have been doing this film by myself because I understand the dangers involved, and I didn't want to put anybody else in danger.

People might not really understand the media climate in Russia. I mean, they sort of know that it's quite censored. So it's very hard for anyone to imagine that such a film would be approved of by any Russian institutions, because any Russian media that goes to the front doesn't go there for a long time. It's very heavily monitored and, definitely, they will not be able to stay for seven months. To do these stories and to get people to speak so candidly on camera, this is not possible in Russia. This is not possible to be done officially.

Let's talk about some of the actual film more properly: What is the story of this film?

It started off as my personal journey to understand my country and my compatriots at a time of a huge historical tragedy and national catastrophe. And my leading question was: Who are the people who are fighting this war on the Russian side? There's not much media that's allowed to work on the Russian side of the front. So what we have is a lot of presuppositions and assumptions about what these people are like. It's not the strategy of the war, but it's an attempt to create a portrait of a person who's fighting this war. It was interesting to actually see for myself what kind of people there are. It’s a portrait of ordinary men and their motivations at a time of this big national tragedy.

What strikes me is that in hearing directly from these men — and, in some cases, women — there is this profound frustration in the fact that the war is happening. There may be patriotism, there may be nationalism there. There's a ubiquitous feeling that this war is wrong, that it ought to end. But I hear a lot of criticism of the Ukrainians, I hear this idea that they were one slavic people and the Ukrainians decided to pursue this divorce, that they're trying to rip up this history. But I hear this lack of curiousness or lack of criticism about Russia's own involvement in starting this war. And I wonder what you make of that. Is it that you genuinely didn't hear it? Is it that it was just less interesting? Tell me a bit about where this blame was being placed by these soldiers.

I don't think it's the most accurate thing to say that they were placing the blame on the Ukrainians, because there were Ukrainians who were fighting in the Russian ranks. It was more like an ideological divide. And this feeds into old ideological divides from the cold war, from the Soviet Union, and prior. Ilya [one of the main characters], for example, is himself Ukrainian, who is fighting on the Russian side. He felt like Ukraine became divided.

So there was a part that was looking favorably toward the West, which meant changing a lot of policies internally and externally and cutting ties with Russia. And there was a part of Ukraine that wanted the opposite, to not have as many ties with the West and have more ties with Russia, or just to keep things the way they were. And so this ideological divide was something that I felt was more prominent than any sort of ethnic divide, because I don't believe there's much of an ethnic divide. Because it's so close. You can't cut a straight line and say: Well, this is a story about Russians versus Ukrainians. That's the tragic thing.

There are Ukrainians fighting on the Russian side, there are Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side. And this conflict ran through families and friendships.

Is that not a forced ideological divide? I think that's what I find really stark is that so much of what I hear these soldiers talking about in your film is invented, right? It was a division that was created on purpose. At the end, you kind of cast a pall on “big politics” that drove this war, but it feels like there's not a lot of probing of those ideological divides. It feels like I don't really hear them actually try to break down why they feel it is like they've become divided. Why they feel it is that it took a war to resolve this ideological divide. And I'm wondering what you make of that.

It's a great question, actually, because you're right. We had a 2 hour, 47 minutes version of this film where we went a little bit deeper into this, into the explanation that they gave of this existing ideological divide. I was mainly speaking to Ilya because he lived in Ukraine. So he was particularly interesting for me, to see how everything went sour. Because at the end of the day, Russians and Ukrainians lived well together. Everybody intermarried, everybody made friends. Why did it go badly? And in his mind — he's not really alone in thinking this, there are a lot of people that I've met in eastern Ukraine, that repeat the same thing — in 2014, the government was changed, in an illegal way, from this pro-Russian president, who fled, to a pro-Western president who started enforcing Western policies that some people didn't agree with.

So Ilya's problem with that was that he felt that the Russian language came under attack. They felt like the world around them, their country started to change, and they were not okay with that.

Now, we had an explanation of that, and we found it to be somewhat confusing because this was supposed to be a portrait of people, ordinary people, who are fighting this war.

What role do you think propaganda plays in this film? And I mean that in the sense that a lot of those beliefs — whether it's this idea that Ukrainians are Nazis, whether it's this idea that NATO was getting ready for war with Russia, whether it's that the Russian language was under attack — these are all propagandistic ideas that were fostered by Russia, right? And there's a scene that I find really striking where you're sitting with Vitaly, the cook, and he's flipping through the paper and he says: Oh, it's all propaganda. And then he's reading every single article intently. There seems to be a recognition that they're being lied to and there seems to be a acceptance of it, and I find that really fascinating.

He was just browsing through it because he was bored, because boredom is actually a big part of being on the front. You have to find something to do.

But in the same vein, many of them said: The TV lies to us, and they always have the TV on the news.

First of all, you have to understand that there's no nationality or nation that's immune to propaganda. So we have Cartoon² who's 20 years old, who has been watching state TV. And I was very curious to film him and to have the opportunity to see if his ideas changed, if the way he explains the war to himself changed. And it's very important to sort of take the temperature of people before and after, and lead them with certain questions and observe how they change in explaining the situation around them. So if you remember, Cartoon was very, very fervent the first time we saw him, where he believes that he's fighting Nazism — and you have to understand, for Russians, Nazism is like a red flag to a bull. It's the worst thing, you have to fight it. But ten months after you see Cartoon, he's confused. What he's fighting for? He doesn't really know why he's there. And that change, that subtle change, speaks a lot about the fact that we have certain reasons for this war that are given for both sides. But at the end of the day, people are still confused. And it's very important to monitor that change in real time.

I was reading an interview you gave, where you talked about convincing some of the commanders to let you stick around by likening your work to some of the early Soviet films that were filmed during the Great Patriotic War, World War II. I thought that was really interesting, because I think it speaks to their belief that they are on a mission of liberation and a mission of honoring the motherland. To some degree, that is the byproduct of propaganda. Again, how much is that manipulation driving these men — to what, in many cases, is their death?

This is actually a cultural context that, perhaps, would be unclear to many people from outside of the region. The Great Patriotic War is the biggest sort of cornerstone of our collective history and collective trauma, for Russians and for Ukrainians. That's why, if you monitor the communications of both sides, they all refer to each other as fascists or Nazis, because in order to get people to rise up against someone, you just tap into that collective memory. And the ironic thing about this is that both sides have the same collective memory. That's why it's not just about propaganda.

So much of the belief of these men — I think you even hint at it — is that this is a war of two sides. In some cases I hear it referred to as a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. In some cases I hear it as a conflict with the West. But it is hard to get past the simple reality that Russia was responsible for the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and it was responsible for the full scale invasion in 2022. And it just does feel like that fact, which it is a fact, is obscured in the film. And I appreciate that these men have both a level of nihilism about it and frustration and anger. But why does it feel like that fact is so far away through most of the film?

Well, first of all, it's not an analytical film. And, by the way, you can't say they invaded [Ukraine in 2014] because they, legally, did not.

[Incredulous come on, man look]

I know exactly what you mean. But, legally — and we have to stay within the legality — it was not. So it seemed like there was a lot of support from NATO states for Ukraine in 2014 and there was support from Russia for the separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine. So at least this was the explanation that I kept getting from people in Eastern Ukraine. And for me, it was fascinating because I was not following that conflict in 2014, 2015, 2016, onwards. I was in Iraq and Syria chasing ISIS. So I had no idea about this stuff. So for me, when they were speaking, I was listening. It was very interesting. And of course, at that point, I started also to monitor Ukrainian Telegram channels and to see how they were explaining this conflict. And I understand that there are two sides to this when it comes to the civil war.

I'm going to assume that you know a fair chunk of Russian Soviet film history. I hear you often talk about this film as Cinéma Vérité, which I find interesting because I think the more accurate term is Kino-Pravda. (Dispatch #60) I understand it's not an analytical film, but can you talk to me a bit about the style and the format of the film?

It's great that you brought up Kino-Pravda, because if you remember one of Dziga Vertov's films, it was revolutionary. You have this uprising and you see all these civilians running away from all these soldiers marching and all that kind of stuff. There's not a single explanation of what these soldiers are doing. What is their motivation? Who sent them? Was it the tsar? This is Cinéma Vérité, and that, by itself is a very, very strong medium.

We have not been able to see past the fog of war. And we understand that there are two sides fighting. You don't have to agree with them, you don't have to like them. But if you just see them and understand where they're coming from, they don't become this evil, faceless thing that it's okay to kill and it's okay to massacre, which is the fuel that would keep this war going forever. I know I've been accused of being overly idealistic, but I think we should be overly idealistic when it's very dark. And it definitely has been dark in the past two-and-a-half-years. We should try to maybe reach some sort of understanding. Maybe that could be the basis for some sort of future piece, whenever that is possible.

Forgive me, this is going to be a little analytical: One of Vertov's later films, Enthusiasm, is actually filmed in the Donbas. And it is a fascinating piece because it is Cinéma Vérité, but it functionally becomes propaganda. Not because anything it shows is a lie, or because any of the people that it portrays are not wonderful and industrious. But it's being filmed in Ukraine at the exact same time the Holomodor is happening, and grain is being withheld from millions of Ukrainians who starve to death. I'll keep reiterating it: Russia started this war. Russia could end this war tomorrow. It is not up to the men who are fighting it to end it — although we could have a side conversation about the lasting symbolism of Battleship Potemkin — I don't think anyone disagrees with the mission of humanizing these men. But to have this be the focus at a time when the war continues unabated, when the shelling of Ukrainian cities continues?

We have to understand that reality of a war is very contrasting. So in the film, you have these three medics picking up a dead body and singing to a pop song. That's the contrast of war. You could have something absolutely terrible happening over there and, over there, have people celebrating the birthday party. That's what war is.

I guess our job as documentary filmmakers is: You capture one reality, I capture another reality. But to say: Here's a film that captures all of it, we know that's impossible. When we studied documentary, we were always told: Keep it narrow, don't go too wide, because you will not be able to make a strong film. Anything that doesn't relate to that subject, that place or that idea or whatever it is you're trying to say, throw it out.

All the films that we've seen from Ukrainian filmmakers — and some of them are fantastic — they were never really asked: Why you didn't go to the Russian side of the front? Why you didn't talk to the people of Donbas, who have been uprising since 2014? What is the problem that they have with you? Why are they fighting for the Russians? And I think that's fair that we don't ask those questions because we know that they will not be able to go to the Russian side and do that kind of story.

There’s one section, I think you’re talking to Cartoon, where you ask him: What do you make of the idea that Russians have committed war crimes here? And he says: Well, we wouldn’t do that. Why would we do that against somebody who doesn’t deserve it? I do think that that scene is really stark because it is simply true that these men are human, but it is also simply true that humans do horrific things in war. A lot of young men just like Cartoon have been responsible for torture, have shot civilians in the streets in Bucha, have committed atrocities in Mariupol. Again, I'm not necessarily sure I'm criticizing you for not going there with it, but it did feel tough to watch him say that. And it did feel tough to then follow him as this war goes on, knowing that despite what he says, he's capable of doing those things as well.

You're absolutely right, in the fact that there are people who commit war crimes. And those war crimes are being currently investigated by the ICC. And me, personally, I have a lot of faith in them to do a good job and to have all the details that we need to know to prosecute people that did. But this is a fine line between assuming that everyone there has committed war crimes, because then you assume that every single Russian has committed war crimes. I think that's just technically impossible to have an entire army just cutting people up on a daily basis. It just doesn't work that way.

You have to understand, also, that I was there for a limited time with only one battalion, because I was there covertly. I did not have a carte blanche to go around every single place in the front and film whatever. I was with them for seven months.

300 out of the 380 people in the battalion were drafted or mobilized. They were just regular civilians, working in factories usually — not the highest paying jobs. And a lot of them, they did not believe that this is possible. Because, they don't see that kind of stuff in the media. That's why, for them, it was shocking that somebody would even ask.

To go back to this question of propaganda, it is hard to ignore the fact that the very things that these men are saying — Ukrainians are Nazis, likening the Ukrainians to the enemy in their collective trauma, the propaganda that has been enforced through TV, through the newspapers, through the Russian government — does lend itself well to committing those sort of crimes. I take your point about trying to humanize these Russian soldiers for Western audiences, but who is humanizing the Ukrainians for those Russians?

Russians don't really have access to the films that were made by people who were filming in Ukraine. You're absolutely right. The Russian audience does not have access to that kind of information, for sure. And you have to understand that tapping into that idea about a common enemy does not just come from propaganda. It also comes from seeing Russian cities being bombed. Yes, Ukraine is being bombed. And, 100%, it's absolutely awful. It should not be happening. But at the same time, to a lesser extent, Russian cities are being bombed. Donetsk, where Ilya is from, is being bombed almost on a daily basis. There are victims every week, or maybe even every couple of days. There are civilians who do not deserve to die, just like Ukrainian civilians don't deserve to die. But to assume that this is only Ukrainian victims and Russians are just brainwashed — no, people tap into that collective trauma in order to name the enemy, like their forefathers named an enemy. Because they see a lot of suffering of Russian civilians as well, or eastern Ukrainian civilians.

And that's also important to understand, that this war is not one sided, as in there's only trauma on one side and crimes on another side. It's a war. War crimes happen and civilians are killed too. And that's very unjust, and this should not be happening.

I mentioned Battleship Potemkin earlier. Another part of the Russian collective identity — whether it is overthrowing the tsarist kingdom, whether it is pushing back against the invasion of Afghanistan, as many of the mothers and wives of soldiers did — part of the Russian identity is also refusing to fight wars that are unjust and refusing to serve leaders who are immoral. The film does humanize. It does also make, to some degree, their ability to soldier on kind of noble. Why isn't there more curiosity about why they fight?

In order to understand the motivations of a person, let's try to put ourselves in their shoes. So I understand that it might be a bit hard for people from the Ukrainian side, especially given everything that they've been through. But just for experiment's sake: Let's say you are a Russian soldier. All around you, you have friends who you really became close to. Some of them are killed, some of them lose a limb. And you may not understand the politics of why your country is doing this or why your government decided to do this, but you soldier on because you have this idea of patriotism. You go where your country tells you to go, without asking questions, and you just do it. There's also a groupthink idea that, everybody's doing it, so obviously I'm going to do it.

And there's also an understanding that the army is a hierarchy. It's not a democracy. They’re not there to vote: Are we going to go on that offensive or not? Is that a good idea or not? Because, as in any army, there are repercussions if you don't. You may not understand the big politics of it, but you physically see that your friend was killed by that side. You're not going to just go away. And that was the fascinating thing about that war. One of the guys that I interviewed last, who was callsign Cedar, he was like the most soft-spoken, the nicest guy who wished for everybody to go home, for the Ukrainians to go home, for Russians to go home-

Ukrainians are home.

Home, leave the front and go to their homes, to their families. After he went on that offensive, which was his first offensive, and half of the group didn't come back — radical change. And that's what happens to people in war. You're no longer fighting for a great idea. Which is what a lot of people are looking for, some sort of explanation why Russians believe in that great idea. It's not about the great idea. It's about personal experience. And that's why it's important to show people as people and their personal experience to understand how they think they're fighting for their friends and for revenging their friends. That's a big factor.

I fully recognize that the Kino-Pravda of the film is what it is. But at the end, you do have this editorial line where you try and summarize the feelings of these men, why they're there, why they're still fighting, and offer a hope that it ends. But it is hard to ignore the fact that even in your own voice, even you have this sort of freedom to say, to criticize, speak plainly. And we don't hear it. I hear this sort of denunciation of “big politics.” But again, it feels like this was an open door for you to — maybe not even necessarily denounce Vladimir Putin — but at the very least, denounce the blind, rabid, patriotism that leads men to war and that leads people to agree to a war that is fundamentally unjust. And I wonder why you didn't do that.

I think some people are looking for the same type of criticism and the same type of sort of slogans that they kept hearing in other documentaries coming from the Ukrainian side, which is condemning and all this stuff. Again, my question to myself with this film was at the beginning: Who are these men? And I wanted to answer that question and nothing else. That was my focus. And at the end of the day, I found my answer in the graveyards where I see these guys who I knew lying there. And the answer was: They're completely ordinary men that are caught up in big politics which exploits their senses of patriotism and friendship and compassion. Vitaly, for example, initially he went because he felt compassion for the people of Donbas. His feelings were exploited to get him to go to the war.

I started by asking the story of this film. And I do understand it from the Western point of view. But you have to imagine there are also Russians watching this movie — whether they have to get a VPN to watch it, or whatever. And I wonder, what do you think they're going to take away from it? They don't need to be told much more about how hard this war is on Russia and Russians. But do you think they will come away from this film with a feeling that this patriotism can be toxic and deadly and destructive, or do you think they're going to come away with it with this further feeling of: These boys are doing the best they can? Because, to hit on your point about optimism and hope, I think the hope would be, at least for me and the Russians I talk to, that at some point someone manages to break down the regime that keeps enabling this war.

I can speculate about it, but I think we'll just have to sort of wait and see. Because the agreement that I had with my producers, from day one, is that whatever film we make, I want it to be available in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — because they're the countries that are most affected by this war. Whatever the reaction will be, I just want them — us, whatever you want to say — to see each other. I don't really think it's either of the sort of the points that you made, for our boys to keep going.

I used to work with the foreign press in order to get by while I was making this film. And that was a question that many of the foreign correspondents that I was working with were asked by readers and by people from the west: Why don't Russians just rise up and get rid of Putin? They just really don't understand Russia. They really don't understand Russia. I understand the question. I've been living half my life in the West, I understand how they think. I understand how Russians think. And there's a big gap.

There is a popular feeling that the west is against Russia and Russians. It's not even about the president himself or about the state: It's against the simple Russian people. Russia was canceled from the Olympics, from all kinds of cultural events. There’s all kinds of rhetoric about how Russia needs to be attacked, how Russia deserves what it has coming to them, how the invasion of Kursk is justified. There are Russian cities and Russians that suffer. There seems to be an increase of war rhetoric, where they're talking about allowing Ukrainians to hit targets inside Russia. It seems like there's more of a push for violence.

If policymakers think that will make people inside Russia rise up against the president, they're wrong. Because the only result that you get is his popularity becomes stronger. That's the result. And I think that's the whole idea of besieging a medieval city, there’s an expectation that the citizens inside that city will rise up and topple the king. No, they will hug the king because they feel like he's at least protecting them. So that's very important to understand.

Listen, thank you so much, Anastasia.

It was a great conversation. I am really grateful to be able to have it.

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This it for this week!

As always, thanks for reading. If you’re seeing this, you’re a paid subscriber: So, thank you!

1. As always: The below transcript has been liberally edited for length, clarity, and readability. At every point I tried to preserve and reinforce the intention of the comment, but I did take some liberties in ensuring that this would be legible.

2. Cartoon is a call sign