On the day of Alexei Navalny’s funeral in Moscow last week, I held my nose and turned on Russian state television. The evening news on state TV, which is still watched by millions across Russia, led with a funeral. Except it wasn’t Navalny’s. Nikolai Ryzhkov, a former prime minister of the Soviet Union who died at the age of 94 on February 28, was also buried on the same day. He laid in state in Moscow’s main Christ the Savior Cathedral, surrounded by a handful of solemn apparatchiks from Russia’s ruling party. There was no mention on state TV of the alternative vision of Russia that was being ..read more

Facebook has a long-maligned yet still active feature called “People You May Know.” It scours the network’s data troves, picks out the profiles of likely acquaintances, and suggests that you “friend” them. But not everyone you know is a friend. Anthropologist Dragana Kaurin told me this week about a strange encounter she had with it some years back. “I opened Facebook and I saw a face and a name I recognized. It was my first grade teacher,” she told me. Kaurin is Bosnian and fled Sarajevo as a child, at the start of the war and genocide that took hundreds of thousands of lives between 1992 and ..read more

Residents of Buenos Aires flooded the city’s sprawling avenues and plazas last week, cookware and kitchen utensils in hand, to literally bang out their fury over a head-spinning series of economic and public policy changes that are deeply dividing Argentina. In what’s been described as “shock therapy” for the country’s failing economy, sectors from healthcare to construction have been deregulated, labor rights have been gutted and nine out of 18 state ministries have been eliminated altogether. Behind it all is the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” economist, television pundit and lambchop ..read more

On January 26, the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled that Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and blocking of humanitarian aid to the enclave could “plausibly” amount to genocide. South Africa, which brought the case, did not get the court-ordered ceasefire it was aiming for, but the judges warned Israel that it must ensure that it does not violate the U.N. Genocide Convention. They also ordered Israel to prevent and punish domestic incitement to genocide, as well as allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.  Historical debates are unusually important in this case, especially bet ..read more

Residents of Buenos Aires flooded the city’s sprawling avenues and plazas last week, cookware and kitchen utensils in hand, to literally bang out their fury over a head-spinning series of economic and public policy changes that are deeply dividing Argentina. In what’s been described as “shock therapy” for the country’s failing economy, sectors from healthcare to construction have been deregulated, labor rights have been gutted and nine out of 18 state ministries have been eliminated altogether. Behind it all is the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” economist, television pundit and lambchop ..read more

On January 26, the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled that Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and blocking of humanitarian aid to the enclave could “plausibly” amount to genocide. South Africa, which brought the case, did not get the court-ordered ceasefire it was aiming for, but the judges warned Israel that it must ensure that it does not violate the U.N. Genocide Convention. They also ordered Israel to prevent and punish domestic incitement to genocide, as well as allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.  Historical debates are unusually important in this case, especially bet ..read more

On a sunny morning in Taipei last August, I joined a few dozen other people at the headquarters of the Kuma Academy for an introductory course in civil defense. We broke into groups to introduce ourselves. As our group leader presented us to the room, she mistakenly called me a “war correspondent.” “No, no, that’s not right,” I interjected. “I’m here because I precisely don’t want to become a war correspondent in the future.”  The Kuma Academy, established in September 2022, trains citizens in the basic skills they might need to survive and help their compatriots in the event of an attack ..read more

In Tudun Biri, meetings happen under a large mango tree in a clearing in the center of the village. The bark on its trunk has peeled back in places, leaking sap — it has become a place of mourning. Nearby is a shallow ditch where, on December 3, a bomb struck the ground while the villagers were celebrating the Maolud, an Islamic festival commemorating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad. Solomon John, 28, was in a nearby building when the first bomb dropped. After the blast, John rushed outside to find dismembered bodies strewn across the ground. The bomb had struck next to the tree, where mostl ..read more

Hello from Palo Alto, For the autocrats, 2023 was a pretty good year. For the rest of us, not so much.  New wars emerged, old ones persisted, and a global rift over reality and truth deepened further. Divisions over how to interpret the world around us have, of course, existed since time immemorial, but we often forget that the yawning gulf between societies today is driven by algorithms engineered in my unlikely new home in Silicon Valley. A few months ago, just as generative artificial intelligence took the global spotlight and we all buckled up for another tech shake-up, I landed in Si ..read more

Year in review: Coda’s best stories of 2023 At the start of 2023, Germany’s far right descended on Dresden for its annual “March of Mourning.” Their show of force was a fist meant to punch a hole in Germany’s traditionally subdued “silent commemoration” of the anniversary of the firebombing of the city by the Allied forces in February 1945. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims,” Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University, explained to Alexander Wells, who wrote a piece on the subject for us. In May, Coda Story teamed ..read more