1.
Friday night, early November. A second-floor lounge in what used to be a warehouse complex jammed at the end of a narrow street in Kyiv, now home to a maze of trendy underground venues, art spaces, and shops. Outside, graffiti artists have covered the walls with murals: “WAR STYLE,” reads one. “Art is a Weapon,” reads the other.
May we live to see a day when it’s the only one that’s wielded.
This night, the lounge is hosting a charity jam session. Each set features a different array of musicians, fellow travellers in what my acquaintance Lyosha, a bassist, tells me is Kyiv’s fusion jazz scene, reawakening now, in the second year of the full-scale invasion. They bring their instruments, sign up at the door, and are assigned a time to meet on stage. Once there, the ad hoc bandmates choose a key and a starting beat, and feel their way through the music together.
The crowd is young and fashionable. Many of them work in Ukraine’s burgeoning digital technology and design sector. Between sets, a bearded soldier stands on the stage, shifting awkwardly as he tells the audience about his military unit, and what they need to keep fighting. One of the more distinctive characteristics of this war is that, while the big-ticket weaponry comes from the West, much of what the soldiers most need to survive in the trenches is crowdfunded.
The jam session’s organizer takes over the microphone then, and introduces items for the fundraising auction. There’s an ink drawing by a popular Kharkiv artist. A mortar shell casing, its payload fired at Russian positions. The bidding is friendly, but fierce. Voices call out thousands of hryvnia in pledges; by the end of the night, they’ve raised the equivalent of hundreds of dollars for the soldier’s unit, which will use the cash to buy something to help. Probably a drone. There are never enough drones at the front.
Onstage, the next group of musicians sink into their jam. The bass saunters and the trumpet howls, and the drums urge them along. A young woman in an oversize blazer grooves to the rhythm as she holds the microphone to her lips. She hums a bit to find the key, then murmurs the first words that come to her mind; softly, at first, but as the band behind her finds its crescendo, her voice heaves into a ragged wail of grief.
“The world is shit,” she cries out, in English. “The world is shit, the world is shit.”
You can say that again, sister.
2.
Actually, the world isn’t shit. It’s just hurting. I mean that in both senses of the word. The transitive verb, and the intransitive. The action, and the feeling. Related to each other, feeding each other, and more often than not, exponentially.
The world is just hurting.
Yes, it was always thus.
Yes, it’s because the patterns in us keep repeating and no, love alone is not always enough. Nor are tears. Nor is writing. Once, I believed, with the naïveté all young writers need, that words held the secrets of our salvation. Secrets, if only we could find the correct order of words to unlock them. Surely, I thought, if we choose our words wisely, if we write from the heart, if we hold onto a moral clarity, we can fix almost anything. We can stop any madness. Heal what is suffering.
Now, all I know is this: every day, for 74 days, I have turned on my phone and borne helpless witness to endless images of kidnapped or maimed or dead children. There are no words that seem enough for this. If there are, then I don’t have them. Nobody else seems to, either. Because if there were words that could stop this nightmare, by now someone smarter than me would have found them.
They look the same, you know. When they’re broken. Wherever they are in the world, the children all look the same when they’re broken.
3.
Over the last month, instead of writing, I became hopelessly addicted to online chess. The game has always been close to my heart; my father had taught me to play when I was little. We’d spend long hours over the board, with me delighting in setting traps and watching as he fell for them, his blue eyes twinkling in dismayed surprise. Or at least, so I believed at the time, and he did nothing to dissuade me.
By my teens, I was a decent amateur player. In high school, I sacrificed the last shred of my social cred by joining the chess club, which led me to play in a tournament and earn a bronze medal, which sounds impressive if you don’t know there were only five players in my age bracket. Still, it felt a nice achievement, so after that I retired from my illustrious day-long career of competitive play.
In recent years, my interest in chess came roaring back. Yes, it was partly The Queen’s Gambit, but more than that, I missed the meditative qualities of chess, the way it can calm and sharpen the mind. I started following tournaments. Started watching hours of YouTube videos analyzing the greatest games of all time. And in the malaise of the last month, needing something to look at that wasn’t dead children, I started playing against actual humans again.
Soon, the games consumed me. I admit, it was more compulsive than fun. Most every spare minute I had was spent on my phone, moving digital pawns over the board. One morning, I was already on my 10th game by 8 a.m., when I made a major blunder: in a rush to set up for a big attack, I’d sent my queen charging onto a square, not noticing my opponent’s bishop lurking at the far end of the long diagonal. My opponent, a man from Turkey, pounced on the defenceless monarch, snuffing out my hopes for a win.
Embarrassed, I typed a message in the chat.
Whoops, I wrote. Clearly, I need a nap. I didn’t sleep well. I live in Kyiv, and we got bombed last night. I was woken up by explosions at 5 a.m.
My opponent was shocked.
“Really?” he typed back. “It is continue?”
Yeah. Eight ballistic missiles. Think they shot them all down.
“OMG I m so sad. When it will be finish?”
Not for years, probably.
“I never see in news it is still war there.”
Haha, I know. It’s old news now.
4.
I have written here before about my growing despondency over the extent to which we are hurtling into a misinformation abyss. It has never been worse than this. Since Oct. 7, social media has been deluged with falsehoods, fake or misrepresented images, and allegations of particularly horrific acts which later turn out to be baseless.
What’s worse is how the emotional intensity of the Israel-Hamas war spurs the spread of this misinformation. In the last two and a half months, I’ve seen people I know are intelligent and rational people sharing clear disinformation, fake images, conspiracy theories and equivocations that amount to nothing short of atrocity denialism, and it is happening on both sides. I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians, and their supporters, wrongly denounce maimed victims seen in photos and videos as “actors,” and images of atrocities as fake. (The BBC had a heartbreaking piece on this phenomenon.)
Making matters worse, the act of challenging misinformation, or even of stressing the need to be cautious of sourcing and wait for solid evidence on the most inflammatory reports, is itself now politicized: to try and call out misinformation, or note where the sourcing isn’t very good, often leads to being accused of being an apologist for terror. What are accepted as facts, in this conflict, are in many places a matter of allegiance, and not evidence. Maybe that’s always been true in some way, but the speed at which it happens now renders productive discourse almost impossible.
Does this matter? I have to believe that it does, in many ways. Misinformation, as we know, has a corrosive effect on any form of trust; the more we see is fake, the less we believe what is real. In this case, it is also inflaming what is already the most globally incendiary conflict, inflaming what is already inflamed by mass death, suffering and horror. That in turn gives more oxygen to hate that threatens innocent people’s lives from Gaza to Jerusalem, and from the United States to Russia. It also makes it nearly impossible for voices of moderation to find purchase. Every post, every Tweet, every word is taken by many not in good faith, but as another salvo in the battle.
We need to find a way to correct course, and quickly, because the generation coming up — distrustful of legacy media that, for all its many flaws, at least has some form of verification and accountability — gets their information from sources which, for the most part, don’t have any such standards. A recent study found TikTok was the daily news source of choice for nearly a third of people under 30. That would be okay, were it not so awash in manipulation by state actors or just the well-intentioned spreading of misinformation and propaganda by earnest, incautious influencers.
We are going to a very, very bad place, and we still have no idea how to handle what that means for news in the future. What it means for anything. Above all, we need to think about who most stands to gain from a world in which basic facts about major events are perpetually and forever in dispute, with no centre to hold them.
5.
It’s noon, on the same day of the big ballistic missile attack on Kyiv. I am now in my sixth hour of playing online chess. I haven’t even gotten out of bed. I’m just moving pawns, over and over. Winning and losing, and not caring too much which is which. Patterns of war. Repetition, meditation, distraction.
Somewhere around the 20th move, I make another blunder. Another queen left with no defenders; another game lost, because I wasn’t paying attention. My opponent is kind enough to say it happens to everyone, though not kind enough to let my queen remain un-captured. Not that I can blame him, I would have done the same.
“How old are you?” he writes, in the chat.
Why do you ask?
“I am 29 from Syria. Now I have shawarma shop in Turkey.”
Ah, I reply. I am a Canadian living in Ukraine.
“Is there still war?”
Yeah, we got bombed last night.
“Daily they are bombing Gaza too.”
I know.
“It is a genocide.”
I’m sorry.
“Russia bombed me in my city Aleppo.”
That’s why I thought you’d understand.
“I pray it all to stop.”
Me too.
6.
Oh, that reminds me.
One of the most bitter twists of misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, and one of its strangest phenomena, is that a staggering number of images of destruction that have gone viral on social media are not images from Gaza, but images taken from the last decade during the civil war in Syria. (The New York Times reported on this, and interviewed some of the original photographers.)
I don’t understand how, or why, this is happening. There is, after all, no shortage of real and horrifying imagery from Gaza, taken by journalists who have been killed by the dozens, along with their families. How do decade-old photos from Aleppo keep getting dredged up and misrepresented as part of the Israel-Hamas conflict?
Confusion over the process aside, two things about this stand out to me as particularly grim. The first is the realization that the years have left us so accustomed, so inured to images of Middle Eastern suffering and death that we can no longer tell the difference between images of one war and another, one ruined city and the next.
The second depressing fact is that, of all the social media accounts sharing the images misrepresented from Syria, many of the biggest are pro-Assad influencers. Which is to say, for years some of these accounts outright denied mass civilian death in cities such as Aleppo, or mocked images of victims. Now, they take those same images, represent the victims as Gazans, and erase again by this act the suffering of Syrians.
Thinking of this, it occurs to me that it is another demonstration of how, in this day and age, we increasingly treat nothing as real, and everything as a narrative. People — flesh and blood people — all become pawns in a war of a different kind, one waged in TikToks and Tweets, an endless battle to capture and confuse our minds.
7.
I’m still playing chess. I can’t stop. I promise myself that after this game, I’ll take the app off my phone. My opponent for this game has an Israeli flag beside his name. He sees the Ukraine flag next to mine.
“Slava Ukrainye,” he writes, in Russian. Glory to Ukraine.
Oh, thanks, I reply. I’m actually Canadian, but living in Kyiv.
“I’m from Mariupol,” he replies.
Mariupol. The city whose name lives most painfully on the lips of every Ukrainian. Mariupol, obliterated, massacred, left in near-total ruin.
We only have 10 minutes on the clock per side, and mine is almost out of time. I can think of nothing else to say in a few seconds except “I’m sorry.” I long for a day when the game of war is not a refuge for so many of those who have lived it.
A housekeeping note. I feel awful I didn’t keep these coming the last while. I’m going to aim for one newsletter a week for the next couple of months, until I’m “caught up” in terms of issues. One thing I should realize is I don’t need to make these things so long, and don’t need to be too much of a perfectionist about them. I think most of my writer’s block is just a ludicrous amount of pressure I put on myself, honestly.
So I’ll be back next week, I promise. I also have a big Free Press piece coming up in January. In the meantime, to those who celebrate, I wish you a beautiful Christmas; and to everyone, may the next week bring you time with those you love, moments of joy, and all the reasons to hope that you need.