Parties were never on my mind more than when I wasn’t attending any. I avoided them for a couple of years, and my interest sharpened as a result. Parties were a very notable casualty of the beginning years of the coronavirus pandemic, though, it must be said, they were a pretty trifling one. Compared with the more than 1 million American lives lost, the lack of parties felt like something that was not worth grieving or complaining about. What is a party in the face of such anguish?

But there’s a sadness to be found in waiting for parties to resume. Multiple years spent under the shadow of the coronavirus have felt, at least to me, like years lived entirely within those last couple of hours before a party you’re throwing is scheduled to start—years of pacing, of overthinking certain details, of nervous questioning: Who will show first? Will anyone come? What’s worse, these feelings have intensified with time, developing sharper edges. Mild social anxiety has blossomed into full-fledged fear. A party, after all, is a gamble; it courts both opportunity and disaster. This is why some of us find parties thrilling. It’s also why many of us dread them.

[Read: Haunted by the ghost of 2019]

I think, for example, of all the parties I have ever attended that I didn’t want to attend, or attended only to devote much of my time to questioning why I was there. Parties are supposed to present opportunities for celebration and joy, yet many are weighed down by other considerations, including those that arise from feelings of social responsibility. Sometimes a party is something we want, long for, and look forward to. But sometimes it can feel like something else: a duty, an obligation, even a punishment.

This article has been excerpted from Sheila Liming’s forthcoming book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. (Melville House)

Throughout the first several hundred years of the word’s existence, party primarily referred to parts of a whole. It stems from the old French parti, which meant a “part, portion.” Later, the word party also came to refer to groups of people who had something in common, such as an opinion or a political cause. The history of the term is thus marked by a tension between communion and partition, with the word sometimes favoring one or the other side.

The history of parties is tangled up with a history of privilege, which is to say, of economic class. When we think of the great partyers of history, we tend to think of those who commanded opulence and wealth, like Marie Antoinette. These historic persons, true to party’s etymology, used their wealth to set themselves apart, to create space and erect fortifications between themselves and others. A party is a device to unite and join, but it is also one that can be used to create or reinforce conditions of separation. An invitation beckons to its target audience and, at the same time, announces to others that they are not welcome.

No wonder parties have the power to make us anxious. They are from their very roots, and even on the level of language, steeped in the stuff of anxiety.

Yet parties persist, in difficult times and even when they’re not supposed to. If parties may be viewed as high points of living—as apexes of hanging out—then it stands to reason that we might look to them when life proves particularly hard. But how does one do that? How is a person supposed to muster the energy and enthusiasm for a party when faced with all the immediate concerns presented by hardship?

The writer Henry Green offers a cautionary tale of how certain frivolous types of people use parties as a form of distraction. Written during the Great Depression, Green’s novel Party Going is about a fictional group of 20-somethings associated with the “Bright Young Things” set. This was a name given to real-life, elite revelers whose exploits filled the British tabloid magazines of the 1920s and ’30s. In Green’s novel, the group is on its way to a party, but becomes stranded at a London railway station on account of fog. They wait out the weather at the station hotel, where they gather in “desperate good humour” and try (but not too hard) to have a good time. That involves fending off a series of existential crises that result from not being at a party. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Green’s characters are all there together. They constitute a group, a faction, a party, in a technical and pure sense. But they are not where parties are supposed to take place for people like them, and this makes them miserable. They while away the hours in stylish despair, blocked from the aesthetic richness that they think makes life more meaningful or, perhaps, that shields them from the meaninglessness of the lives they have built for themselves.

[Read: A mathematical formula for the right time to show up at a party]

Green’s snapshot of this era appears glitzy and composed, at least at first glance. His characters, who are essentially overgrown children, engage in witty debates about superficial concerns. They complain about the “tiresome” fog, viewing it as a personal affront to their plans, and one character considers the social acceptability of helping oneself to a host’s liquor and making a cocktail while that host is absent. But all that repartee serves to disguise feelings of social awkwardness and ineptitude. By the time the fog lifts and the trains start running again, the hours spent together in close quarters have caused many of their relationships to sour, making the prospect of the party they were bound for feel less attractive. Their party-going, Green suggests, has been revealed for what it is: a means of evasion. What they were really seeking, all along, was not a good time, or even a respite from the world of the Great Depression, but activity for activity’s sake, to keep them busy. Their ceaseless quest for distraction ends up exposing them to the vacuous truth of normal life.

But seen through the lens of a period such as the Great Depression, a good party may look not simply like a means of distraction but also like a survival mechanism. A party instills a pause that, sometimes, works to delay the inevitable and allows its participants to rest and plan. A party gathers people together and grants them temporary shelter within the space of that pause. A party cannot solve the problems of the world, of course, but it can be the spark that sets the fires of courage burning for the people who must face those problems.

Another way of saying this is that parties are about exercises in wishful thinking. We throw parties in order to fashion containers for the preservation of hope. Even the verb we use to encapsulate that action, throw, might suggest tossing a life preserver into open water. A party is a place to park our dreams. We stuff our parties full of the things that we desire most from the world: sex, desirability, social companionship, indulgence, freedom from consequences. Then we go back to the real work, which is the work of living, and we wait for the next one to come around.

Back when I was in college, I think our parties were all about hope. They were where we practiced and performed our skills as fledgling adults. They included elaborate themes and costumes because we were in Ohio, a place that forces a person to make her own fun, and also because dressing up is sacred to the work of performance itself.

I recall, for instance, one of the last parties I ever attended on campus. Some friends of mine had concocted a plan for a final costume party. Its theme was pointedly aspirational: Dress as the person you will be in 10 years.

Rain poured down that night, the sort of rain that used to bend the lilacs to the ground and scatter their blossoms across the campus sidewalks. I was dressed in all tweed, having cobbled together a Goodwill outfit. I showed up soaking wet, wearing what felt like 10 pounds of sopping wool. A friend of mine was dressed like a kindergarten teacher, in a smock that had finger paint smeared all over the front of it. Last I heard, she’s teaching preschool in Portland.

We were using these costumes of ours to communicate and advertise our hopes for the future. I hoped that in 10 more years, I would have realized my dream of being a college professor. I had dressed up as something I was not in order to reveal something that I wanted very badly, something I was scared of trying for, because it is a very terrifying thing to have to try.

At that party, I felt exposed, because I knew that I was announcing my intentions in a very public way. I had dressed in a heavy woolen three-piece suit, on a hot and stormy May night, not because I had ever seen a college professor of mine actually wear one but because I knew the outfit spoke in the way I wanted it to and said the things I was still afraid of saying out loud, to myself or anyone else. But my fears proved smaller than the seductions of hope. I wanted to gather with my friends, to squeeze into a dorm room one last time and bask in those collectively generated currents of optimism. I was using a performative gesture in order to feel the weight of the future in my hand, to test whether it might be possible after all.

That’s why we need parties, even as we might dread them. They force us to make time to envision our desires and aspirations. If parties are about fantasy, then to live without them means to live without routinized opportunities for collective fantasy-building. Back during the peak of social distancing, parties felt impossible—and, sometimes, so did the future. Moving forward, we’re going to have to work to reclaim both.

This article has been excerpted from Sheila Liming’s forthcoming book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.

At the end of the first episode of Harry & Meghan—the five-and-a-half-hour exploration into the tender center of everlasting love; rat-bastard English people and the nasty things they get up to; heady, “Goodbye to You” defection from the British Royal Family; and the reality-show-within-a-reality-show miniseries Fifteen Million Dollar Listing—I informed my husband that henceforth he should call me “C” and I would call him “R.” This would put us in league with the glamorous young couple, and also allow us to imagine that we are characters in a Victorian novel whose names must never be revealed, not even to each other.

This project was immediately undermined, because it is just about impossible to impose a new nickname on someone you’ve known intimately for three decades, and with whom—even in the early years, back in the rent-controlled apartment with your big dreams and your red wine—you have never achieved even an ounce of the “Band on the Run”/Sentence Finishing/Pillow Talk Spectacular of the famous couple. These kids are so in love that absolutely any obstacle—bad press, frosty English sister-in-law, mean American half sister-in-law, disappointing fathers, paparazzo in a boat—only makes their love more passionate, their need to review their wedding videos and photo albums more urgent.

I had settled in to watch Episode 2 when R said that he’d rather watch hockey highlights, a preference that produced in me a stab of the kind of minor, familiar disappointment that—stab by stab, year by year—amounts to a strong and unbreakable union. In this way, Harry & Meghan, though it depicts a couple married for only four years, is a statement on marriage itself: Isn’t the institution, at its essence, a union between two people making compromises and trying to avoid their in-laws?

Ultimately, however, this is a series shaped around a single question: Can these two titled but underappreciated lovebirds transcend their bad luck and learn to find happiness in a nine-bedroom mansion located in the most exquisitely beautiful place in the world?

This is a story about resilience.

The very first scene of this Russian novel takes place at Heathrow Airport and consists of a clearly careworn Harry looking into his laptop or cellphone—the couple have been advised by “a friend” to keep a video diary, because “one day it will make sense,” and also (presumably) because B-roll doesn’t grow on trees—and telling us, “We’re here.” Before you can ask yourself where, exactly, they are (a Starbucks in Terminal 5? A laptop-charging power pole in Terminal 3?) a chyron solemnly informs you that Harry is speaking from inside the WINDSOR SUITE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT.

Let this be a reminder that whatever you or I think of as the better thing (the first-class lounge, the ramekin of warm nuts in business class, Boarding Group A) is merely a token in a game that the truly rich would never play. The Windsor Suite comprises eight “private lounges,” in which the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the traveler come true, starting at $4,000 for two hours. It’s the bottle service of Departures.

You haven’t realized just how vile air travel has become and how deeply you have been demoralized by it until you’ve imagined what it would be like to be greeted at the curb by a doorman, whisked into a private elevator, and delivered into the capable hands of your own butler, who will be just a bell cord away to answer your every call.

This, then, will be the ongoing challenge of watching (and presumably making) Harry & Meghan: The show needs to provide a compelling enough account of their emotional injuries that we are moved by them, while also luxuriating in the unimaginable opulence in which the couple nursed their wounds. It’s been done before: Wuthering Heights; Harlequin romance novels; all 22 seasons of Kardashian content. We’ve all had our problems, but have we had them in the rolling hills and designer shopping malls of Calabasas? The poor little rich girl is a perennial. But watching Meghan Markle sitting in a grand living room while bravely explaining that as a senior royal she wore muted colors so as not to upstage anyone could try the patience of Malala. (The couple was interviewed inside someone else’s Montecito pleasure dome, now on the market for $33.5 million, presumably because they’re determined to safeguard their … privacy. Or could it be that their own $15 million spread is too down-market for the dream to endure?)

We will be introduced to a few themes in this 330-minute (plus hockey highlights) presentation, the first of which concerns what was apparently a shock to Meghan and an oversight of Harry’s: the overt racism that lingers among members of European royalty who live in castles and whose exalted status depends on convincing a populace that fairy tales are real.

At Meghan’s first Christmas lunch (an annual tradition in which the extended Royal Family gets together at Buckingham Palace before the seniors decamp for Sandringham), Princess Michael of Kent arrived wearing a white coat, on the lapel of which was affixed a large brooch, depicting a Black man wearing a golden turban, and decorated in colored gemstones. The figure was a “Blackamoor,” portrayed in a historical style celebrating the glory days of colonialism and combining exotica with the perennial theme of ownership: of the man, the continent, the gold, the gems.

Why in God’s name would this woman wear this ornament to an event where Meghan Markle was being introduced around? Let me remind you that Princess Michael of Kent is the daughter of a literal Nazi, and has spent years making viciously racist comments (“The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children”) and then offering insulting “apologies” for them. But please don’t call her a racist, because she feels that as “a knife through the heart.” She has traveled to Africa and described in a TV interview her “adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people … I really love these people.” Moreover, “I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes, I did not get away with it. But I dyed my hair black.” The apology for the jewelry is in a class of its own: “The brooch was a gift and had been worn many times before. Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offense.” In other words, everyone’s been cool about it except Meghan Markle, and this whole episode has victimized Princess Michael, who is now enduring distress.

Anyone can find themselves related to a racist, and the standard method of dealing with this fact is simplicity itself: You disavow them, you shun them, you block their phone number, and if anyone asks about them, you tell the truth. That’s not what the Windsors have done. Princess Michael lives in a grand apartment in Kensington Palace (owned by King Charles, on behalf of the nation), where, at various times, she has been neighbor to William and Kate, Princess Eugenie, and—for half a decade—Harry himself, who lived in a cottage on the palace grounds.

God knows Harry himself hasn’t been perfect. He dressed up as a Nazi (specifically as a member of the Afrika Korps—you know, Rommel and all that) for a costume party when he was 20, and he tells us during the show that it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. But, he says earnestly, he atoned by meeting with the chief rabbi in London and traveling to Berlin to talk with a Holocaust survivor, which is apparently the Windsor Suite version of doing the work. What’s going on in that family that you need to have some champagne and me-time in Heathrow VIP and fly to Germany to learn that Nazis = Bad? Currently, Harry’s immersed in a wholehearted effort to unpack his “unconscious bias,” but that could be an endless enterprise, given the complex history of his own family.

This is the incoherence of the couple’s position. They had wanted to carve out a “progressive new role” for themselves within the Royal Family, a role they had seen as including more outreach to the Commonwealth nations, in particular the ones (principally in Africa and the Caribbean) in which the majority population consists of nonwhite people. But what could possibly be progressive about representing the crown—the entity, more or less, that perfected the concept of empire—to these countries?

In the other corner: M’s family.

As she has throughout this courtship and marriage, Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, remains a class act. In her interviews for the series, she shows grace and restraint, and an absolute determination not to sully herself or her daughter with the antics of either her ex-husband’s family or Harry’s family—two groups that seemed equally matched. You can clearly sense that having her daughter and grandchildren safely back in California, barely two hours’ drive from her home in L.A., is a tremendous comfort to her.

Meghan’s father—and the aforementioned half sister, Samantha, from his first marriage—turn out to be spectacular characters, an accurate portrait of whom would require the combined talents of William Faulkner, J. D. Vance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The half sister turns out to be genuinely frightening, having once left Florida to show up uninvited at Kensington Palace in order to “deliver a letter” and later pitching a book on “the evolution of my biracial lens.” (She’s white, her parents are white, whatever biracial lens she possesses has been trained on her biracial half sister and the best way to make her miserable.)

The salve for having been raised among these various characters has been the intense and world-historical level of romantic love that bonds our principals and that provides the through line of our five and a half hours in their company. Have you ever been to one of those weddings where the bride and groom—although well into their 30s—each deliver a speech that includes so many cute and romantic and “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” moments that you don’t know where to look and your face becomes a rictus of sympathetic embarrassment for the couple, and people start kicking you under the table?

Harry & Meghan is the eternal return of that experience.

The things the British tabloids had to say about Meghan’s race are beyond the pale, and that this kind of coverage sells papers in the U.K. was reason enough for Harry to take his wife and baby and get the hell out of there. The soundness of this decision was proved a few weeks ago, when The Sun published a column by a popular television commentator named Jeremy Clarkson: “I hate her on a cellular level. At night I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

When I read that, I felt a stab of fealty and protectiveness more powerful than anything evoked by Harry & Meghan. The Sun withdrew the column and apologized for it after 20,000 complaints—but someone accepted it, someone approved it, someone published it online, and any number of people must have known that in addition to the people the column angered, there would be plenty of people who agreed with it. Who would like this kind of filth? Clarkson spells it out for us: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.” No kidding, old man.

The very top of the column set the tone. It said that everyone had known that Harry (whom Clarkson referred to as “Harold Markle”) was a “slightly dim” but fun-loving fellow, and Meghan had “obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.”

And there it is: The idea that women will use whatever wiles they have to castrate a real man and turn him into a eunuch who lives to serve her, no matter how much humiliation she serves up. People like Clarkson—and Piers Morgan, and so many other men of their generation—are apparently experts on the treachery of women. Many are also devotees of the notion that masculinity is best defined by military service, the ultimate test of manhood. Clarkson has made popular television documentaries about great battles of the Second World War, and apparently that, too, is an act of manhood. Except that it’s not.

Here’s the truth: Harry served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, the second as an Apache helicopter pilot—once apparently helping rescue American servicemen under Taliban fire—and fought with great valor, very much in the shit. He was held in the affectionate, ball-breaking high regard of his fellow soldiers. This wasn’t Charles getting seasick in the navy, or Andrew forgetting how to sweat in the Falklands, or William assisting the Liverpool Coast Guard on civilian rescue sorties. This was war, and Harry survived it, came home with the usual psychic wounds of combat, and carried on with his life.

Harry is a grown man, he’s had a lot of experience with women (and “bedroom promises”), and he married the one he loved. When she was miserable, the way his own mother had been miserable, he didn’t do what his grotesque father had done—cheat on her, treat her like a broodmare, ignore her suffering; he moved her and his family far away. Considering that three of his grandmother’s four children got divorced, he seems to have a better idea of what constitutes marital obligation than most of his in-house role models.  

Quit while you’re ahead! you want to yell at the television screen—but they can’t. These two burn through money at a fantastic rate, and the only thing that reliably sells is their own story, which is getting pretty threadbare. It’s so familiar to us by now that we could tell it ourselves.

But we probably could never tell it the way they do, could never cast the fairy-tale spell that they can. We could never convince a vast audience that the paper moon hanging over the cardboard sea is real—if only you can believe in it.

In the first episode, we see a video diary of Meghan standing on an endless lawn, in the blue shadows of early evening, the sky beyond turning the saturated orange and pink of a color-enhanced postcard of the original California dream. She’s wearing a striped apron and a pair of gardening gloves, and she’s holding a handful of blush-colored roses. In the weary tones of Every Mom, she tells us in a near whisper, “Both the babies are down.” It’s a “nice, calm night.”

For a moment, we take it all in: the huge lawn, the sunset, the rose garden in which not a single bloom is marred by spider mites or overwatering or bad attitude. Her voice lowers to an actual whisper and here she is, the picture of a pretty wife and mother, her children sleeping and her attention turned to simple abundance: “Just picking some roses.”

Files reveal Tony Blair's government was once offered the chance to move the venue out of London.

British fashion designer and style icon Vivienne Westwood has died aged 81. She passed away peacefully at her home in London on Thursday, according to an official statement from her eponymous company.

Here is a list of people you should not currently want to be: a Russian sausage tycoon, a Russian gas-industry executive, the editor in chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard director, the head of a Russian ski resort, a Russian aviation official, or a Russian rail magnate. Anyone answering to such a description probably ought not stand near open windows, in almost any country, on almost every continent.

Over the weekend, Pavel Antov, the aforementioned sausage executive, a man who had reportedly expressed a dangerous lack of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, was found dead at a hotel in India, just two days after one of his Russian travel companions died at the same hotel. Antov was reported to have fallen to his death from a hotel window. The meat millionaire and his also-deceased friend are the most recent additions to a macabre list of people who have succumbed to Sudden Russian Death Syndrome, a phenomenon that has claimed the lives of a flabbergastingly large number of businessmen, bureaucrats, oligarchs, and journalists. The catalog of these deaths—which includes alleged defenestrations, suspected poisonings, suspicious heart attacks, and supposed suicides—is remarkable for the variety of unnatural deaths contained within as well as its Russian-novel length.

Some two dozen notable Russians have died in 2022 in mysterious ways, some gruesomely. The bodies of the gas-industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide notes at the beginning of the year. Then, in the span of one month, three more Russian executives—Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya—were found dead, in apparent murder-suicides, with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of the Sochi resort owner Andrei Krukovsky at the bottom of a cliff; a week later, Aleksandr Subbotin, a manager of a Russian gas company, died in a home belonging to a Moscow shaman, after he was allegedly poisoned with toad venom.

[Anne Applebaum: The Kremlin must be in crisis]

The list goes on. In July, the energy executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his suburban St. Petersburg swimming pool with a bullet wound in his head. Think Gatsby by the Neva. In August, the Latvia-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport apparently fell from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment, a mile from the White House—right before Ravil Maganov, the chairman of a Russian oil company, fell six stories from a window in Moscow. Earlier this month, the IT-company director Grigory Kochenov toppled off a balcony. Ten days ago, in the French Riviera, a Russian real-estate tycoon took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.

To reiterate: All of these deaths occurred this year.

One could argue that, given Russia’s exceptionally low life expectancy and unchecked rate of alcoholism, at least some of these fatalities were natural or accidental. Just because you’re Russian doesn’t mean you can’t accidentally fall out of an upper-story window. Sometimes, people kill themselves—and the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest recorded in the world. For Edward Luttwak, a historian and military-strategy expert, that’s at least part of what’s happening: an outbreak of mass despair among Russia’s connected and privileged elite. “Imagine what happens to a globalized country when sanctions kick in,” he told me. “Some of them will commit suicide.” But the sheer proliferation of these untimely deaths warrants a closer look.

After all, this is what the Kremlin does. There is precedent for this phenomenon. In 2020, Russian agents poisoned—but failed to kill—the Putin critic Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent; a decade earlier, they succeeded in a similar attempt on the Russian-security-services defector Alexander Litvinenko. In 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko ran against a Kremlin-backed opponent for Ukraine’s presidency, he was poisoned with dioxin and left disfigured. Thirty years earlier, the Bulgarian secret service, reportedly with the help of the Soviet KGB, killed the dissident Georgi Markov by stabbing him on the Waterloo Bridge in London with a ricin-laced umbrella tip. Russian agents often “turn to the most exotic,” Luttwak told me. “People who do assassinations for commercial purposes look at [their methods] and laugh.”

[Read: The spies who love Putin]

Suicides are more difficult to decipher. For oligarchs who have failed to show sufficient loyalty to Putin, coaxed suicide is not an implausible scenario. “It is not uncommon to be told, ‘We can come to you or you can do the manly thing and commit suicide, take yourself off the chess board. At least you’ll have the agency of your own undoing,’” Michael Weiss, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, told me. Did Antov really fall out his window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he get a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no option but to leap? “All of these things are possible,” Weiss told me.

In the Kremlin’s Gothic murderverse, imagination is key.

Defenestration has been a favorite method of removing political opponents since the early days of multistory buildings, but in the modern era, Russia has monopolized the practice. Like Tosca’s climactic exit from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo, death by falling from a great height has a performative, even moral aspect.

In Russian, this business of assassination is known as mokroye delo, or “wet work.” Sometimes, the main purpose is to send a message to others: We’ll kill you and your family if you’re disloyal. Sometimes, the goal is to simply remove a troublesome individual.

A few years after the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny died while jogging outside London in 2012, at least one autopsy detected chemical residue in his stomach linked to the rare—and highly toxic—flowering plant gelsemium. “These are the clues of evidence that the Russians are fond of using,” Weiss told me. A calling card, if you will. “They want us to know that it was murder, but they don’t want us to be able to definitely conclude it was murder.”

[Robert Service: Back in the U.S.S.R.]

Poisoning has that ambiguity. It is literally covert, concealed, sometimes hard to detect. Defenestration is a bit less ambiguous. Yes, it could be an accident. But it’s a lot easier to conclude it was murder—an overt assassination.

“Things that mimic natural causes of death like a heart attack or a stroke, the Russians can be quite good at doing that,” Weiss said. The deaths range in their showiness, but they’re all part of the same overarching scheme: to perpetuate the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus, whose slimy tentacles can search out and seize any dissident, anywhere. As the Bond franchise had it, the world is not enough.

The war in Ukraine is not universally popular among Russia’s ruling elite. Since the conflict began, sanctions on oligarchs and businessmen have constrained their profligate and peripatetic lifestyles. Some are, understandably, said to be unhappy about this. High-level Russian elites feel as if Putin “has essentially wound the clock backwards,” Weiss said, to the bad old days of Cold War isolation.

This year’s spate of deaths—so brazen in their number and method as to suggest a lack of concern about plausible, or even implausible, deniability—is quite possibly Putin’s way of warning Russia’s elites that he is that deadly octopus. The point of eliminating critics, after all, isn’t necessarily to eliminate criticism. It is to remind the critics—with as much flair as possible—what the price of voicing that criticism can be.

Sean Dilley says he acted 'instinctively' after being targeted in central London early on Tuesday.

When you have a kid with a severe illness, whatever makes them happy during it becomes immeasurably valuable to you—no matter how small.

I learned this when my 1-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As part of his treatment, he had to get a tracheostomy—a breathing tube was inserted in the base of his neck and prevented him from talking. After he lost his voice, Henry communicated through Makaton, a language program that uses symbols, signs, and speech to enable communication for people who might otherwise have a tough time being understood. The program is similar to sign language, but it combines hand gestures with spoken words (for those who can speak) and sometimes references to images or objects as well. Many people with Down syndrome find it helpful, as do kids like Henry who can’t speak because of a tracheostomy and nerve damage.

This article has been excerpted from Rob Delaney’s new book, A Heart That Works. (Spiegel & Grau)

You may have seen Makaton if you’ve ever watched the beloved Mr. Tumble on CBeebies, a BBC channel for little kids. Mr. Tumble is the alter ego of a guy named Justin Fletcher. Because he’s probably the most famous Makaton user in the United Kingdom, he’s helped countless families develop communication skills that foster substantively better and closer relationships. When we found his show, Henry and I didn’t have much longer left together, but Mr. Tumble helped us understand each other in what time we did have. It is fair to say that I love Mr. Tumble. One time, I heard a mom talking about her preferred CBeebies shows, and she said she didn’t like Mr. Tumble. I had to walk away. Fuck with Mr. Tumble, and you fuck with me! She’s lucky I had errands to do and didn’t have time to go to jail that day.

I’ve yet to meet Mr. Tumble, but I have had the good fortune to meet Singing Hands, who probably brought Henry the most joy out of anything in his sweet little life. Singing Hands are Suzanne Miell-Ingram and Tracy Upton, two wonderful women who (among many other things) have their own channel on Great Ormond Street Hospital’s televisions. They perform all sorts of songs and nursery rhymes using Makaton and their lovely singing voices. The second we found their channel, Henry was hooked. We watched Suzanne and Tracy sing each song again and again, and Henry and my wife, Leah, and I practiced signing along. It was so goddamn fun. And Henry was great at it. His tumor and surgery affected only his physical skills; they had no noticeable effect on his brain’s frontal lobe. So he was as alert and curious and driven as any other kid. Memories of him like this are some of my most treasured.

One day, I was down in the hospital’s cafeteria and did a double take. Tracy from Singing Hands was there, sitting at a table, just like a normal civilian might. I took a deep breath and approached her with the mix of purpose and humble deference with which a person might approach Sir Paul McCartney. I told her I was one of, I’m sure, thousands of parents whose ability to communicate with their child was directly improved by her beautiful work. She didn’t ask me to please back away from her table, but rather was happy to hear about Henry, and about how her and Suzanne’s work had affected us. She even asked if she could come up to Henry’s room and meet him. And meet him she did. Henry was agog. He was confused at first, like anyone would be if one of the coolest people in existence essentially walked out of the television, but kids adapt fast, so he soon achieved equilibrium. He was so happy to sign “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and other nursery rhymes with her. So was I! I still remember what his smile looked like on that day.

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A little less than a year after Henry died, I was asked to read the CBeebies Bedtime Story. If you’re not British, you should know that CBeebies probably does at least 25 percent of the U.K.’s parenting. It does it well, too. Its programming is excellent—high quality and educational. Shows like Something Special, Hey Duggee, and Bluey entertain kids (and adults) with wildly creative, sensitive, stimulating shows—and they’re not interrupted by commercials. At the end of each programming day, at 6:50 p.m., a different celebrity reads a story before they say goodnight. Ever since I moved to the U.K. in 2014 to act and write for the show Catastrophe, I’d wanted to do a CBeebies reading. I asked if I could do my story in Makaton.

CBeebies was happy to oblige, and I was surprised to learn that mine would be the first ever Makaton Bedtime Story. We’d agreed that Penny Dale’s version of Ten in the Bed would be a good book to do in Makaton. I practiced in the days leading up to the recording, and on the appointed day, I went to the London hotel in which we’d record. They had me on the edge of a bed with the 10 necessary stuffed animals perched across it. They also provided a Makaton coach, who made sure I did all the signs perfectly. The recording went reasonably well until I had to sign and say the phrase “I’m cold and lonely.” I started to cry. It just shook me to know that I’d be doing a book that Henry loved, using the method of communication I’d eagerly learned for him, and he wasn’t alive to see it. I was desperate to get it on TV so other families could watch it and use it, but it hurt terribly to do something he’d have enjoyed so much. The producer said we could take a break if I wanted to, and I said no, I am crying because I miss my son Henry. I learned Makaton for him and now he’s dead. So I am going to take a few deep breaths and we can continue filming.

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I didn’t mean to chastise a lovely person for humanely and very understandably offering me a break; I just knew that disabled kids and their families deserved their first Makaton Bedtime Story, and it was our job to get it on the air. It was one of those instances when I felt that the show, as it were, must go on.

It did, and when that Bedtime Story went out, people really loved it. Seeing the happiness it brought kids and parents who need Makaton to communicate flooded me with love and gratitude for my sweet, blessed Henry. His death and physical absence cause me great and enduring pain, but I feel his presence and effect on the world when families with sick and/or disabled kids get a smile out of something Henry taught me. During his life, I always knew shows like these carried power for me, because of how much happiness they brought him. But I wasn’t prepared for how much they would continue to mean even after he was gone—helping me the way they once helped Henry.

This article has been excerpted from Rob Delaney’s new book, A Heart That Works.

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