What Happened Today: March 03, 2022
Ukraine peace talks; opioid settlements; TikTok under investigation
The Big Story
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov cast a shadow over today’s second round of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators by telling an interviewer that the Russian forces would carry out their military ambitions until “the end,” echoing the sentiment of a Kremlin statement released today after President Vladimir Putin’s phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron. “It was emphasized that the tasks of the special military operation will be fulfilled in any event, and attempts to gain time by dragging out negotiations will only lead to additional demands on Kiev in our negotiating position,” the statement said.
For his part, Macron warned Putin that the continued attack on Ukraine “will cost your country dearly” and that “you are lying to yourself” about the Kremlin’s sustained rhetoric of Ukraine being led by neo-Nazis. Warming temperatures will soon turn the ground around Kyiv to mud and further confine the Russians to the roads, stalling their ambition to swiftly take the capital and potentially prompting the Russians to utilize missile and air weaponry similar to what was used to demolish the city of Aleppo in the Russian invasion in Syria. Some 1 million refugees have fled the country as fighting continues in smaller cities and villages around the south and east, with significant casualties for both sides in Mariupol, a primary port city that has lost power and water during the battle. “These bastards couldn’t find a way to break us. So now they are trying to prevent us from repairing electricity, water, and heating supply,” the mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boichenko, said of the Russian forces preventing Ukrainian aid and emergency workers from tending to the civilians. “They destroyed the trains so that we could not evacuate our women, children, and elderly people.”
In Russia, state news outlets have been directed to not refer to the “invasion” or to “the war” but rather to reference the “special military operation.” One of the few remaining independent media outlets, Echo Moskvy radio, was taken off the air today by Russian officials. Protestors in Russian cities continue to be arrested in large numbers as the value of the Russian ruble plummets and sanctions cripple the economy. In a video address condemning the Russian attacks on densely populated cities as “frank, undisguised terror,” President Zelensky said, “Nobody will forgive. Nobody will forget.”
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-russia-what-you-need-know-right-now-2022-03-02/
The Back Pages: A Review of the New King Hannah Record
The Rest
→ In an effort to dial down tensions of nuclear threat, yesterday the U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled the scheduled testing of a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile so as not to give the impression that the military was responding to President Putin’s move earlier this week of raising the Russian nuclear force alert level. “[We have] no intention in engaging in any actions that can be misunderstood or misconstrued,” a spokesperson for the Pentagon said today. Some analysts have argued that Putin’s use of the nuclear alert level was a significant and dangerous development, while others dismissed it as President Putin’s empty rhetoric to win some easy leverage as the invasion of Ukraine turns into a military disaster.
→ Tablet senior writer and The Scroll editor Jacob Siegel moderated a conversation last night with Tablet columnist Lee Smith and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. In the clip here from the discussion about the role of the United States in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Smith explains what it means for Ukraine to be a buffer state.
→ Investors at hedge funds and wealth management firms involved in loan deals for private jets and luxury yachts were asked by Credit Suisse to destroy any documentation about the deals, reports the Financial Times, just as new sanctions from several Western and European nations hit Russia and a roster of Russian oligarchs. The request to permanently erase all confidential information about the loans comes after a recent leak of the “Suisse Secret” papers, a trove of data about 30,000 Credit Suisse clients that showed extensive links between the Swiss bank and known drug smugglers and several oligarchs. The loans referred to in the letter to investors were part of the bank’s effort to securitize $2 billion in credit for the purchase of “jets, yachts, real estate and/or financials assets,” and the loan deals were sweetened with an 11% interest rate to entice investors. In 2018, sanctions against Russian business leaders with ties to the Kremlin were responsible for a third of the defaults of the bank’s luxury boat and private plane loans, a level of risk that several prospective investors noted when they passed on the bank’s more recent loan packages.
Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/bfea0069-4143-4e4b-accb-9712ce95a282
→ A bipartisan group of eight state attorneys general have launched an investigation into TikTok, seeking to determine if the social media platform violated consumer protection laws and put the public at risk by using techniques to “boost young user engagement, including increasing the duration of time spent on the platform and frequency of engagement with the platform,” the group announced yesterday. The effort continues the group’s previous investigation of Instagram and the intentional harm it’s caused young users of that social network. With some 90 million U.S. users on TikTok, the platform has been the target of increased criticism for how successfully it funnels users into binges on the platform, during which they consume hours of video that some argue can lead children and particularly teenagers to develop eating disorders and suffer from depression.
→ After nine years spent writing 250 reviews and logging 600 books on the book platform Goodreads, Nelson Minor, a coder, was informed by the platform this week that it had lost all his data and would not be able to recover it because of a bug in its system. In a blog post about Goodreads’ “callous disregard for their users’ data,” Minor laments the loss of nearly a decade of his written reviews but misidentifies the owner of the content. Indeed, like all of the work users give away to social media networks, the reviews were Goodreads to use, or lose, from the beginning.
→ Johnson & Johnson and the three largest drug distributors in the United States finalized a $26 billion settlement with state and local governments, resolving the roughly 3,000 lawsuits contending that these companies helped drive the opioid epidemic. This is the largest settlement related to the opioid epidemic to date, and it comes amidst news that the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, have finalized a similar agreement, worth $6 billion. The funds will begin flowing to city and state governments in April. Many states, including New York (which will receive $263 million) and Pennsylvania (which will receive $1 billion), have set up boards to assess how to best use this money. Most of the money will likely go toward expanding harm reduction infrastructure and eliminating the financial barriers that often make recovery difficult, especially by bringing down the cost of medications and drug treatment programs. More than 70,000 Americans have died of an opioid-involved overdose in the past year.
→ The video game developer Epic Games scooped up the music streaming platform Bandcamp yesterday for an undisclosed sum, a deal that some worry might mark the end of Bandcamp’s artist-friendly practices. Unlike Spotify, which pays artists an average of $0.004 per stream, Bandcamp gives artists 85% to 90% of all sale profits. Trying to get out in front of the criticism, Epic said in a statement that it shares the Bandcamp “mission of building the most artist-friendly platform that enables creators to keep the majority of their hard-earned money.” In the past, Epic has tussled with Big Tech over their monopolistic practices, challenging Apple in 2020 about the 30% cut it takes on all purchases in Apple iOS apps. Epic, though, is partially owned by investors who also have stakes in Spotify and major music labels, which have prompted some critics of the deal to speculate that Bandcamp will sideline artists in an effort to become more like the Spotify platform. The musician Damon Krukowski wrote on Twitter, “Did we just lose our independent digital record store[?]”
→ Once Twice Melody, the excellent eighth album from the duo Beach House, became Billboard’s number one album after selling more than 20,000 copies in its first week. Hailing from Baltimore, the purveyors of cinematic shoegaze beat out new records from Mary J Blige as well as soul crooner Leon Bridges. Beach House vaulted to the top slot after a wave of demand for their album on vinyl, selling 14,500 units on wax.
→ As Russia pushes deeper into Ukraine, volunteers across the world are using Arweave, computer software that securely stores files on a distributed network of computers, to create an archive of the war. Sam Williams, one of Arweave’s creators, tweeted last month that “the Arweave community has archived more than 5 million documents from Ukraine in order to generate a permanent and immutable record of events there.” That number has since grown to more than 6.5 million, as a growing network of activists work to archive the invasion and its aftermath. They are also collecting documents related to Ukrainian history and national identity amidst fears that, should the country fall, there will be a process of forced Russification.
David Grossman reviews King Hannah new album, I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me
Similar to how the power of flight changed humanity’s perception of the earth, the Sony Walkman revolutionized the act of listening to music. No longer did a person need to be in a crowd, or carrying a large piece of equipment, to hear songs. The act of walking around listening to music created a new experience, best described as cinematic. Who hasn’t had their headphones on and felt like they were the main character in a movie?
King Hannah, a band formed in 2017 that is just now releasing their first album, titled I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me, is a cinematic band. Their first album is filled with Hannah Merrick’s evocative vocals, sung with a muted mystery, and Craig Whittle’s soundscape guitars, which can take the slow-burning route to a satisfying crunch.
Words like evocative, mystery, and even that old music-writing cliché smoky all apply to Merrick in a way that might lead a reader to think she’s the next coming of Lana Del Rey. But she’s not. Where Del Rey focuses on constructing and deconstructing the American Dream, the Scouser band (which is how people from Liverpool, England, refer to themselves) is more focused on the mundane. On the album’s title track, which sounds quite defiant, Merrick announces her sins: “I never remember / Names of big film stars / Steve Carell I know, though.”
King Hannah observes the self-aggrandizing mythologies that we all tell ourselves throughout the day, asking if they just might be true. The album’s opener, “A Well-Made Woman,” opens with a hypnotic guitar strum as Merrick gives an autobiography. “I used to be a / A singer by day / And bartend by night,” she says, accurately describing her state when the band formed, both members working at the same restaurant.
“Oh, and I’ve been working a long / A long, long, long time,” she says. And then the chorus: “I am a woman / A brave, brave one / I am a woman /A well-made one / A brave, brave one.” We’ve been given very little in terms of words to prove this point, but the music speaks for her, as the strum spins out into a riff on the verge of feedback. The track is slow-paced and patient, letting listeners take on the implications of Merrick’s declarations for themselves. It feels like a fuzzier version of Billie Eilish’s James Bond torch song, “No Time to Die.”
Elsewhere, the band imagines exes choking on dumplings and remembers riding go-karts. “Growing up I, I was a real wild one,” Merrick says almost conversationally on “Go-Kart Kid (Hell No!).” As elsewhere, the actions taken here are not presented as extremely wild. She had a go-kart and would drive it around their “big, big yard” just one hill away from her grandma and taid (the Welsh word for “grandfather”). In the background, Whittle offers various “hell no!” and “hell yeah!”s in response to her description. One of the album’s slower tracks, it eventually moves into heavy, crashing guitars that recall the best ’90s shoegaze.
Pulling from Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey, and Mazzy Star, King Hannah creates a sound all their own, making the real world feel majestic without any need for rose-colored glasses. It’s cinéma vérité with guitars.
David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man.