The man who walked 1,000 miles around the Oval

Why Putin has so many friends in the global south

When the West tried to slam Russia with sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, says Sarang Shidore in Foreign Policy, “practically the entire global south refused”. Attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to enlist countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia to participate in tough measures against Vladimir Putin yielded just a single signature: Singapore. Today, Donald Trump is trying to pressure countries that trade with Russia by hitting them with tariffs. In particular, he has turned his ire on India, slapping an additional 25% tax on its imports to the US in a bid to strong-arm Delhi into giving up Russian oil, and as a warning to others. But if Washington thinks an aggressive push will wean the global south off Russia, “it should think again”.

Many non-aligned countries have good reasons to maintain ties to Moscow, and to “welcome its persistence as a great power”. Russia is the biggest arms dealer to India, Algeria and Vietnam; in several African states – especially in the Sahel – Russia has stepped in as a security guarantor, displacing France and the US. India and Turkey buy masses of Russian oil; Brazil relies heavily on Russian fertilisers, as do Mexico and Colombia. Moscow is also the biggest international player in nuclear energy, with active projects in Bolivia, Egypt, India, Iran, Turkey and elsewhere. More broadly, none of these countries shares a border with Russia, so they don’t fear its tanks rolling in. What they do fear is the world being carved up into “spheres of influence” by two superpowers, and being forced to conform to “rules set by the mighty”. Russia is big enough to put checks on America and China, though not powerful enough to emerge as a global hegemon. That’s a “goldilocks” power the global south are quite comfortable with.

Tens of millions of bison once roamed north America, says Alexa Robles-Gil in The New York Times, “grazing on grasslands, forests and plains” from the Great Basin of Nevada to the Atlantic coast. It’s hard today to imagine the scale of these herds: Lakota Indians gauged their size not by headcount, but by the number of days it took them to pass. After being hunted nearly to extinction in the 1800s, the hulking beasts exist only in small pockets, with just one migratory herd remaining – in Yellowstone National Park. This herd travels more than 1,000 miles in a year, grazing different habitats along the route. And it turns out they play a crucial role in rejuvenating the ecosystem. A study published last week found that their grazing increased the density of microbes and nitrogen in the soil – improving the nutritional value of the plants that grow there by up to 150%.

The acid-tongued critic with a soft spot for whodunnits

If there was one thing the notoriously sharp-tongued critic Dorothy Parker hated more than anything, says Kasia Boddy in the London Review of Books, it was repetition. In 1919, aged only 25 and just months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she said she had enough “bitter experience” to know that “one successful play of a certain type” would result in a “vast horde” of copycats. She complained about sitting through a “mighty army” of productions dealing with war (“I feel like a veteran”) and the “Irish question” (“what a rough day it will be for drama when Ireland is freed”). Perhaps worst of all were the melodramas about soldiers returning from the battlefield. “Heaven knows the war was hard enough,” she wrote. “Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.”

Fired from Condé Nast after complaints from bigwig Broadway producers, Parker turned her hand to literary criticism. She avoided works she liked – “What more are you going to say of a great thing than that it is great?” – and focused on those she didn’t. She wrote that a Winnie-the-Pooh book was so full of whimsy she had “fwowed up”. Atlas Shrugged was “not a novel to be tossed aside lightly”, she is said to have declared. “It should be thrown with great force.” She freely admitted to not finishing some books, such as Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (“the Lord knows I tried”) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (“conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood”). The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about repetition, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She was, she confessed, “a confirmed user of whodunnits”.