When news comes out that someone has suffered an email breach, my first instinct is to pity them and practice extreme charity. I don’t remember any emails I wrote a decade ago, but I’m sure there’s something in there appalling enough to sour my relationships with every friend, ex, or co-worker I ever had. Give me your email password, and I will ruin your career.

This week, the careers in jeopardy belong to a handful of Americans and Europeans who were, by the looks of their emails, groomed by the Iranian government to promote conciliatory policies toward Tehran. According to reports by Semafor and Iran International, Iranian foreign-policy bigwigs such as Mohammad Javad Zarif identified think-tank staffers of Iranian origin, sponsored meetings with them, and used the group to coordinate and spread messages helpful to Iran. The emails, which date from 2014, suggest that those in their group—the “Iran Experts Initiative”—reacted to Iranian outreach in a range of ways, including cautious engagement and active coordination. The Iranian government then paid expenses related to this group’s internal meetings; cultivated its members with “access to high-ranking officials and extended invitations to visit Tehran,” according to Iran International; and later gloated over how effectively it had used its experts to propagate the Islamic Republic’s positions.

Graeme Wood: Talk to coldhearted criminals

The government had reason to gloat. It picked excellent prospects, some of whom sucked up to Tehran over email and echoed its negotiating positions publicly. A few of them ended up in and near positions of prominence in the U.S. government through connections to Robert Malley, a veteran Middle East hand in Democratic administrations. Malley, who led Obama teams focusing on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq, is known to favor negotiation with unfriendly governments in the region and to scorn the “maximum pressure” approach that replaced nuclear negotiation when Donald Trump entered office. Earlier this year, Malley lost his security clearance for reasons still not explained, and he is on leave from government service. (He did not reply to a request for comment.)

One of Tehran’s targets, Ariane M. Tabatabai, joined the Biden administration’s Iran team with Malley and is now the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Another, Ali Vaez, formerly worked as an aide to Malley on Iran issues. That is the disturbing upshot to the reports: Witting participants in an Iranian influence operation have been close colleagues with those setting the Biden administration’s Iran policy, or have even served in government and set it themselves.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, dismissed the reports as “an account of things that happened almost a decade ago, most of which involved people that do not currently work for the government.” I assume he meant the U.S. government. Anyway, the accusations are serious and can’t be batted away by the suggestion that 2014 was a long time ago.

One sign of the gravity of these accusations is the unconvincing attempts to minimize them. The commentator Esfandyar Batmanghelidj said opponents of Tehran had smeared the analysts merely because they “maintained dialogue and exchanged views with Iranian officials.” He went on to note Semafor’s links to Qatar and Iran International’s to Iran’s archenemy, Saudi Arabia. The journalist Laura Rozen tweeted that the stories were “McCarthyistic” and targeted blameless analysts “because they try to talk to everybody and because of their Iranian heritage.”

Defending the emails as maintaining “dialogue” so ludicrously misrepresents the accusation that I am forced to conclude that these defenders find the actual accusation indefensible. No one is alarmed that Americans of Iranian descent are talking with Iranian-government officials. What’s alarming is the servile tone of the Iranian American side of that dialogue, and the apparent lack of concern that the Iranian government views them as tools for its political ends. Rozen and Batmanghelidj don’t dispute the emails’ authenticity. Comparing the Iranian influence operation to supposed Qatari and Saudi ones is, in turn, tacit admission that the emails are probably real.

Cultivating a source is fine. But any self-respecting analyst, journalist, or politician wants to be the one cultivating, not the one being cultivated. This mutual back-scratching can erode one’s integrity and independence. That is why the Iranians do it: to turn influential and otherwise smart people into their pets, and eventually condition them to salivate at the issuance of a visa, or an email from Javad Zarif. Responding to these overtures is fine. You can butter up an official (“Your Excellency”), maybe grovel a little for a visa. But the writing itself, and the analysis behind it, must be independent to the point that even the most cynical observer could not accuse you of altering your views to please a subject.

By this standard, some of the reported exchanges between the Iran Experts and their convenor are mortifying. After the report, Vaez, a deputy to Malley, admitted on X (formerly Twitter) that he’d sent a full draft of an op-ed to the Iranian government. “I look forward to your comments and feedback,” his email to the Iranians read. If I sent a source a draft of a story, I would be fired. (I asked The National Interest, where the article appeared, if its policy also forbids sharing drafts. The editor, Jacob Heilbrunn, did not reply.) Sending questions is laudable. Checking facts is standard practice. But a magazine article is not a Wiki whose contributors are also its subjects. Sharing a full draft of an article, whether for approval or just improvement, makes the recipient an unacknowledged co-author.

Vaez later pledged to the Iranian foreign minister to “help you in any way,” by proposing “a public campaign” to promote Iran’s views on its nuclear program. He offered these services “as an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty.” Vaez, like his former boss Malley, has written widely about Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, for magazines including this one. (Attempts to reach Vaez through his employer to verify the authenticity of the emails and their context were not answered by the time of publication.)

According to the same reports, Adnan Tabatabai, CEO and founder of the German think tank CARPO, “offered to prepare articles for Iran’s foreign ministry.” “We as a group [could] work on an essay,” he suggested. “It could, for example, be published under a former official’s name.” Tabatabai, the report says, worked as a contractor for Malley’s International Crisis Group. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ariane Tabatabai (who is not related to Adnan) wrote to her contact at the Iranian foreign ministry and asked his advice on whether to work with officials in Saudi Arabia and attend a meeting in Israel. “I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go,” she asked Mostafa Zahrani of the foreign ministry. She made clear that she personally “had no inclination to go” to a workshop at Ben-Gurion University, but she thought it might be better if she went, rather than “some Israeli,” such as Emily Landau of Tel Aviv University. Zahrani told Tabatabai to look into Saudi Arabia and avoid Israel. She thanked him for the guidance, and she went to Tehran herself in 2014. In another email to the Iranians, she noted that she had recently published an article arguing that Tehran should be given more leeway to spin up centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

These emails look bad. So would mine, if they came out in a selective leak, and so would yours. But I’m not sure that they would look this bad, or that my excuses would be so weak.

Vaez tweeted that he “shared the draft as a courtesy after [Iranian] officials claimed I had been too harsh on their position in my writing.” Even if sharing a draft were permissible, would he extend the courtesy to Trump officials? “[ICG’s Iran] work has always been informed by the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders,” he claims. I am confident that if you plumbed his inbox, you would find no fan mail addressed to “Your Excellency” Mike Pompeo, offering his devoted and patriotic service. Nor would he soften the blow of criticism of Trump officials (whose Iran policy was built on sanctions and drone strikes) by giving them a “courtesy” peek at his next work.

Roya Hakakian: Ebrahim Raisi has blood on his hands

For once, the Iranians themselves are blameless. As conspiracies go, the one alleged here is mild. They found Westerners of Iranian extraction who did not despise their religious government, as so many Iranian expatriates do. They made a list. They flattered its members and waited to see who welcomed the flattery and reciprocated with offers of service. These techniques paid off splendidly when the Biden administration started appointing the very people Tehran had been grooming. (Vaez was poised to join Malley at State, but the appointment was never made.)

The emails do not demonstrate or suggest that Ariane Tabatabai, now in the Defense Department, or others not in government, became agents of Tehran. The Pentagon says that Tabatabai was “thoroughly and properly vetted” for her current job but refuses to say whether her emails were accurately and fairly quoted. Even if they do not show that she is a security risk, they do show that she and others responded to Tehran’s blandishments and sought its approval. The administration should find staff who know Iran and its leaders, ideally well enough to recognize Zarif by the smell of his cologne or the sound of his footfall. To get that close takes some ingratiation. The method of ingratiation matters, though, and in this case, it stinks.

A new forecast expects the overall German economic output to contract this year, mainly due to a slower-than-expected recovery in the industry and private consumption.

The inflation rate in Germany is expected to be 4.5% in September 2023.

2022 was a “turning point” for global wealth, says German financial company Allianz in its latest Global Wealth Report.

A Nazi-era law in Germany jails those who can't pay public transport fares. Arne buys their freedom.

“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.

Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at a graveside. The name of my home city suffices for this.

I carry my town inside me and mark it on Google Maps with a heart and the word home. Russia has physically erased it from the face of the Earth and made its name a byword for destruction, for street battles of a ferocity hardly seen since World War II.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Sometimes, I stare for hours at new photos of ruins published in local chat groups. I’m looking for the city I remember: I’ve walked this street hundreds of times on my way to school; my classmate lived in that building; my dentist worked in the neighboring one, where I had an appointment on February 24, 2022, that I never made. When I identify the neighborhood, I feel relief: I haven’t forgotten everything. My town is imprinted in me.

In peacetime, I gave tours of Bakhmut when friends visited from other cities. But I’ve never tried to do this virtually, to walk someone through a city that effectively no longer exists. Few buildings survive here, only ashes, and tons of broken concrete that people once considered their homes. No life remains, or almost none: Visible in drone footage are chestnut, apricot, and cherry trees that miraculously withstood the Russian onslaught, although Bakhmut itself did not.

Let me take you to my Bakhmut.

Bakhmut is small, roughly 40 square kilometers, and just a little more than an hour by bicycle from end to end. In the summer, the steppe gets hot, no matter the time of day. But by October, the leaves have turned and fallen in the light wind.

Stupkey, to the city’s north, sits on massive salt deposits that made Bakhmut a mining town for hundreds of years. Once, I came here with Mark van den Meizenberg, the scion of a Dutch family that established a salt mine called “Peter the Great” 140 years ago. We walked through tall grass until we came to a ravine and a salt lake, near the site of the old mine. Mark’s family lived here until the beginning of the First World War and the revolution, burying their dead in the local Dutch cemetery.

The Bolsheviks put an end to “Peter the Great,” and salt extraction soon moved to richer deposits in Soledar, just 10 kilometers away. I’ve ventured into those industrial salt mines about a dozen times, always finding new marvels: a subterranean church; intricate salt sculptures; galleries with ceilings soaring up to 30 meters, where symphony orchestras have played; a grand tree festooned with garlands; a therapeutic sanatorium; even a football pitch. I brought my friends to see these things—and to feel beneath our feet a seabed from 250 million years ago, whose salts have seasoned the meals of every Ukrainian household.

Once I went with a group that included a local artist, Masha Vyshedska, who brought her ukulele. We nestled into a secluded corner of an expansive gallery, under the soft glow of the lights we’d carried. Masha strummed, and I captured the moment on video. The salt walls reflected her towering shadow and returned echoes of her ukulele as the sound traveled through the underground caverns. So engrossed were we in the moment that we lost track of our group and nearly found ourselves stranded in the mine overnight. Now that enchanted space has slipped behind the front line, inaccessible.

Starting in April 2014, when Russia made its earlier play for eastern Ukraine, militants stormed a military base near Tsvetmet, an industrial area just south of Stupkey, five times, hoping to capture the 280 Ukrainian tanks there. The Russian-backed militants brought guns, grenade launchers, and tanks. Local activists smuggled supplies and essentials over the fence to the Ukrainian soldiers. The militants occupied parts of Bakhmut that spring, but by July, our special forces had repelled them.

I lived near the base at the time. Tsvetmet is mostly factories and private houses, but not long before the war, a much-loved recreational area had sprung up here, called the Alley of Roses for the hundreds of different-colored rose varieties that bloomed from spring to late fall. The park bordered on a lake where we picnicked and fed the ducks and swans.

I remember sitting in the hallway of my apartment building, listening to the rumble of tanks on the asphalt under my window and waiting for the sound of automatic fire to subside. My husband and I were expecting a child. When the streets quieted, I ventured out, just to make sure that the Ukrainian flag still flew over the base. It did, though the base lay in ruins, and when the sun rose, we took our cameras and set out to report. A Ukrainian soldier defending the post saw my look of despair and embraced me, assuring me that, thank God, everyone was alive and everything would be okay.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

My son, Tymofiy, was born in February 2015. The very next day, we felt the vibrations of Russian shells exploding on the outskirts of Bakhmut. A nurse told me to take the baby to the maternity hospital’s basement: “They’re going to shell again,” she said. There we huddled, seven frightened mothers and their infants, as well as silent men and staff members. A girl who had just given birth a few hours earlier was brought down on a stretcher. I started to panic, calling relatives and friends to say that we were being evacuated. I imagined fleeing with my son in my arms. But the rumor of renewed shelling was false, and soon we returned to our rooms.

Being afraid eventually becomes tiring. You start to respond skeptically to warnings of possible shelling, but the tension doesn’t dissipate, even when weeks go by without the sound of cannons and without new rumors that feed on your fear. The Ukrainian flag flying over the tank base always comforted me.  

Yan Dobronosov / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

When Tymofiy was small, we would take him to the local supermarket for ice cream before riding our bikes to the promenade along the Bakhmutka River. The park was another new one: Before the riverbed was cleaned and its banks strengthened, this place was neglected, overgrown with reeds. Now local fishermen climbed over the fence and sat by the water waiting for a catch, and children gathered on playgrounds with swings and basketball courts. Adults hid in the shade of young trees and took photos with green sculptures of dinosaurs, elephants, and bears.

The Bakhmutka gave its name to our city. Around it, in the wild fields, a fortification against Tatar raids from Crimea appeared first, and later, the Cossack saltworks. The fortress of Bakhmut shows up on maps starting in 1701. It sat behind a wooden wall, with straight streets leading to gates, a church, houses, and the saltworks.

In our local museum, a model of the fortress had pride of place. I liked to look at it as a child: The houses were made of matches, and you could see the river that divided the fortress in half. After 500 years, speeches and songs in Ukrainian once again refer to Bakhmut as a fortress—a place whose function is to stop the enemy and to protect.

Bakhmut’s central square has the usual things: a town hall, a fountain, shops and restaurants. But I can’t help lingering on the empty pedestals—granite podiums of history on which no one stands.

One plinth used to hold a statue of Lenin, typical for any Ukrainian city: tall, gray, ugly, constantly soiled by pigeons that left their white traces. Under that statue in 2014, a crowd gathered with Russian flags, agitating against the Revolution of Dignity that had just driven Viktor Yanukovych’s Russian-backed government from Kyiv.

I was an editor for a local website at the time, and I brought my camera to the square. I saw buses parked nearby with Russian plates; they had carried demonstrators over the border. But many in the crowd were also locals, and their presence pained me. One protester told me I was forbidden to film, but I kept on. Little did my colleagues and I know that our fellow journalists in an occupied city nearby would be abducted and held hostage for doing the same.

Just 100 meters away from Lenin, on another granite pedestal, stood Artem, a Bolshevik revolutionary who did nothing especially beneficial for Bakhmut, yet for some reason, the town bore his name during the Soviet era. Only in 2016 did Artemivsk become Bakhmut again. That year, cranes lifted the stone replicas of Artem and Lenin and transported them to an industrial zone for storage. But the residents of our town couldn’t agree on who or what should replace them, so the spots remained vacant.

Tymofiy, 4 years old, posed on Artem’s pedestal for a photo in 2019. I compared him to the project “Inhabiting Shadows,” by the artist Cynthia Gutierrez: She installed stairs that allowed anyone to climb the pedestal of a toppled Lenin in Kyiv. There, one could experience the flux of historical symbols, from ascension to decline, and then oblivion.

On summer evenings, my family liked to gather for dinner on my parents’ veranda, at their house not far from the city center. My parents had come to Ukraine as refugees from Armenia in 1989, fleeing the Nagorno-Karabakh war to start anew in Donbas. In the 1990s, the four of us lived in a single room, my parents working tirelessly to raise my sister and me. Thirty years on, they envisioned spending their twilight years in the modest house with the veranda. Their grandson came to see them there and played in the yard, under a large cherry tree.

That house and its veranda are gone. Missile strikes first obliterated the roof, then the courtyard. We learned this from satellite images. Our family had taken nothing from the house except documents. Everything my parents had built was destroyed.

South of the city, past the landfill where the city failed to build its waste-recycling plant, are the gypsum mines that, along with salt, made Bakhmut attractive to industrialists. Mikhail Kulishov, a local historian, used to give tours here even for children, taking care to hand out yellow helmets in case the rock crumbled.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending values Americans claim to hold]

The gypsum galleries are alive with bats, which are a protected species in Ukraine. Parts are flooded and attract extreme cave divers. The story of the mines begins at the end of the 19th century, when a German engineer named Edmund Farke contracted with the government of Bakhmut to extract gypsum for alabaster factories. His gypsum works created an extensive cave system, part of which was later used to mature the local sparkling wine. Tourists would go there for tastings.

But for me, the gypsum caves were more of a place for mourning. During World War II, the Nazis used the mines to wall up 3,000 Bakhmut Jews alive. People gathered there yearly to remember the victims. During the Russian occupation of Bakhmut in 2023, the Wagner Group set up its headquarters in the tunnels of the winery.

On the southern edge of Bakhmut, in the year 2023, you'll see nothing but the ruins of my city, the skeletal remains of its burned-out buildings and bombarded streets. There are no longer any people here. For my part, I began our tour with insomnia, nights in Kyiv punctured by air-raid sirens announcing Russian drone and missile attacks. My work for the Ukrainian press brought me to Sloviansk, just 20 kilometers away from Bakhmut, but I could get no closer: Artillery was (and is) still booming there.

Mostly, I offered you this tour from a fortress on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. I came here with Tymofiy, now 8 years old, for a retreat so that we could get some sleep—yes, Ukrainians travel now for sleep. The place is ideal, I think, because it is as far away from Russia as you can get in Europe. I climbed the walls of this ancient Portuguese fortress and raised my Ukrainian flag, with the name of my hometown, Bakhmut, written on it.

We are returning to Ukraine, my son and I. Our Bakhmut no longer exists, but one way or another, we’re still there.

Surveys show that hardcore political beliefs are spreading beyond traditionally right-wing demographic groups.

Twenty-five years ago, in What Would Google Do?, I called for the book to be rethought and renovated, digital and connected, so that it could be updated and made searchable, conversational, collaborative, linkable, less expensive to produce, and cheaper to buy. The problem, I said, was that we so revered the book, it had become sacrosanct. “We need to get over books,” I wrote. “Only then can we reinvent them.”

I recant.

Umberto Eco was right when he said, “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.” When exactly the modern book was invented is a matter of debate. Was it by Gutenberg? No. He mechanized the manuscript. Was it half a century later, at the end of books’ incunabular phase, with the addition of the title page, page numbers, paragraph indentations, and other characteristics of the book as we know it? I think not. That describes the form of the modern book, not its soul.

For me, the book became the book a century and a half after the opening of what I call the Gutenberg Parenthesis (a title borrowed from a theory by three Danish academics). That’s when print became a canvas for creation: of the modern novel with Cervantes, the essay with Montaigne, and alongside them the birth of the author and soon the Enlightenment. Since then, books have changed little, except for what each might contain and how each might be produced and sold. The book is the book. It is a space between covers to be tamed. Its finitude makes demands upon author and editor, who decide what fits, what is worth saying, and what they hope is worth discussing and preserving—though the reader is the one who will ultimately make those decisions, who finishes making the book.

The death of the book has been oft foretold. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo worried that the book would kill the cathedral. Now the worriers wonder what will kill the book. As Elizabeth Eisenstein, who founded the field of book history, told the Media Ecology Association in 2002, “The last two centuries have witnessed not a succession of deaths … but, rather, a sequence of premature obituaries.”

In 1994—the same year the first hyperlinked browser, Netscape, debuted—Sven Birkerts issued his sigh-filled j’accuse against the ebook, data, and the internet in The Gutenberg Elegies. “The formerly stable system—the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and the reader at the other end—is slowly being bent into a pretzel,” he wrote, proclaiming that the internet would result in a “fragmented sense of time,” a “reduced attention span and general impatience with sustained inquiry,” a “shattered faith in institutions,” a “divorce from the past,” an “estrangement from geographic place and community,” “language erosion,” the “waning of the private self,” and an “absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future.” He further fretted about “the decline of the prestige of authorship” and a “major sacrifice of authority,” not to mention “cognitive and moral paralysis.”

[From the October 2023 issue: Fiction on trial]

Like many of his fellow eulogists, Birkerts worried most about a loss of so-called deep reading. Later, the National Endowment for the Arts was similarly concerned, warning in 2004 that a survey showing a decline in “literary reading” justified a “bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the culture” and was cause for “grave concern” about “irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation” leading to “vast cultural impoverishment.”

In response, Leah Price has been a voice of calm and reason. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, the founder of the Initiative for the Book at Rutgers University noted that in the years after the book had been declared dead, sales of printed books rose as those of electronic books drooped. “When we mourn the book, we’re really mourning the death of those in-between moments,” she wrote. Worry for the book is a proxy for other fears. “We may be seeking refuge from technological and commercial upheavals, from the people and places that crowd in on us, or from our own sickness and weakness. The problem is that treating the book as a bunker may shortchange its potential to engage with the world.”

The book is often seen as an escape from humanity. That is just what its critics once feared: that young people and especially women would lose themselves in fictional worlds and their passions. “Just over a century ago,” Price wrote, “one moralist warned that ‘some people cannot stand very exciting or thrilling stories, just as some people are better without any wine.’” The book historian Roger Chartier said: “Uncontrolled reading was held to be dangerous because it combined corporeal immobility and excitation of the imagination. It introduced the worst ills: an engorged stomach or intestines, deranged nerves, bodily exhaustion.” Over time, expectations regarding reading have reversed as students today are directed to engage in solitary, lengthy, and deep reading as a measure of their seriousness, intellect, and maturity. Reading equals virtue.

The book has many meanings. Books are companions, so we are not alone. Books are romantic, vessels for memory and emotion evoked by their heft and their smell. A 2017 study created a Historic Book Odor Wheel, which treated the emissions from old paper, leather, and the wood they rest upon like wine, sampling and analyzing air from libraries to dissect books’ bouquet: woody, smoky, earthy, vanilla, musty, sweet, almond, pungent. Thus the modern bookstore sells not only books but candles and cologne that smell like them. Books are feelings. Books are shields; before people were accused of avoiding human contact by staring at their phones (never mind that they could be staring at conversations with others), people were accused of antisocial behavior for reading books in public. Books mark privilege; in the libraries of the rich or the Zoom rooms of those isolating from COVID, they are status symbols. In the latter, for example, video viewers rate one another’s bookshelves and buy books just to improve their scores—“proclaiming the self through the shelf,” as the scholar Jessica Pressman put it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The people who don’t read books]

In 2006, Kevin Kelly, a Wired editor and unabashed digital utopian, promised that a universal, digitized library would “transform the nature of what we now call the book,” because “unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.” He foresaw “real magic” when “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages … When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity.”

Speaking at BookExpo that year, John Updike spat curmudgeonly dudgeon in response, calling Kelly’s vision “a pretty grisly scenario.” He did not want to perform for his lunch, only to write for it. “In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and printing press, communication from one person to another—of, in short, accountability and intimacy?” Updike mourned the loss of the Parenthesis: “Books traditionally have edges … In the electronic anthill, where are the edges?” He ended with a call to arms: “So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts.” Kelly and Updike dueled amid an effort by Google to scan millions of books, over the dead bodies of publishers and authors, who launched a long copyright battle in court. In 2020, researchers at UC Berkeley and Northeastern University studied the effect of digitizing books and found that, especially for less popular titles, having them searchable online increased sales of physical copies. So then digital does not destroy the book.

What is a book? In his book of that title, Joseph Dane wrote: “‘The Book’ is simultaneously a thing, a force, an event, a history.” As a scholar of early book history, Dane concentrated on the book-copy, the “material object that exists in time and space and carries with it its own unique history.” He decried the idea of “print culture” that Elizabeth Eisenstein and her chief critic, Adrian Johns, debated, declaring that “what exists is not print culture at all but rather the modern scholar’s invocation of print culture.” Dane complained that “Eisenstein defines the problematic term ‘print culture’ by opposing it to an even more problematic term ‘scribal culture’ … Scribal and print culture, if these things exist at all, coexist. They did in the late Middle Ages, they did in the early modern period, and they still do today.”

[Andrew Ferguson: There’s no substitute for print]

Did I write an entire book making the case for print culture? And am I now making a case for digital culture? Not so much. I do not think there ever was a uniform, shared vision of print culture. That is my point: We imbue the book with our own expectations and desires. In Birkerts’s case, that was to maintain a set of societal standards and norms. In Price’s case: “Seeing books thrust into the service of comfort and sanity and good taste, I started wanting to recover the book’s power to upset and unsettle and even anger readers.” My desire is for each of us to gain the perspective to interrogate the values, presumptions, meanings, norms, and expectations we instill in the book so that we can better decide what we want to preserve or change on the other side of the Parenthesis. As the scholar Andrew Piper wrote in Book Was There, “We cannot think about our electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past.” That has been my quest. “Technologies don’t just happen. At least not yet,” Piper added. “We are still agents in this story, and we have some choices to make.”

The digital age is not a blank slate; its creators and proprietors to date have already etched its surface with the decisions they have made about its operation, rules, and economy. Yet I will insist that it is early days—just over a quarter century past Netscape’s introduction; 1480 in Gutenberg years—and that we have time and opportunity to make our own decisions. I wish the book to stand as a monument to its age, soon eclipsed, but also as a still-vital institution in our lives so that we can examine our own perspectives through it. “The book has historically symbolized privacy, leisure, individualism, knowledge, and power,” Jessica Pressman wrote in Bookishness. “This means that the book has been the emblem for the very experiences that must be renegotiated in a digital era: proximity, interiority, authenticity.”

“One thing is certain: What we call culture is in fact a lengthy process of selection and filtering,” Jean-Philippe de Tonnac said in an enchanting conversation he had with Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco in the latter pair’s book, This Is Not the End of the Book. “Now more than ever, we realize that culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.” Eco explained that culture is not about remembering everything but instead about deciding what to forget. “Culture is essentially a graveyard for books and other lost objects,” said this man who died with 35,000 books in his library. “Scholars are currently researching how culture is a process of tacitly abandoning certain relics of the past (thus filtering), while placing others in a kind of refrigerator, for the future. Archives and libraries are cold rooms in which we store what has come before, so that the cultural space is not cluttered, without having to relinquish those memories entirely.” Then here comes the internet, which “gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever … We expected globalisation to make everyone start thinking alike. What has actually happened is the opposite.”

Our institutions of print culture—editors, publishers, booksellers, critics, scholars, teachers, librarians—are unprepared on their own to help us filter, not flounder, in the abundance of what we still think of as content but that we must reconceive as conversation: voices, data, and life witnessed and recorded. Not that there hasn’t always been a problem of abundance: “Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person read a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day.” So calculated the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid. The problem—no, the opportunity—of abundance exists now on an entirely different plane, requiring new mechanisms to cope with it. “Culture filters things, telling us what we should retain and what we must forget,” Eco said.

What will digital culture be in contrast with print culture and scribal culture? I cannot say, because we have not left print culture and we have barely begun to imagine and build digital culture, let alone understand the immensity of the task before us. “Everything that has been said about life in an online world has already been said about books,” Piper wrote; he was comparing current complaints about the internet making us “stupider, twitchier, addicted, and perhaps worst of all, bad spellers” against complaints that:

“Four hundred years ago in Spain people read too many romances (Don Quixote), three hundred years ago in London too many people wrote crap (Grub Street), two hundred years ago in Germany reading had turned into a madness (the so-called Lesewut), and one hundred years ago there was the telephone. We have worried that one day there would be more authors than readers (in 1788), that self-publishing would save, and then kill, reading (in 1773), and that no one would have time to read books anymore (in 1855).”

In the early 19th century, the German poet Christoph Martin Wieland asked, “If everyone writes, who will read?” More than two centuries later, contemplating blogging, The New York Times snarked: “Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few.”

[From the November 2008 issue: Why I blog]

In the end, I will propose but one lesson: As we begin to leave Gutenberg’s Parenthesis—a journey that itself might stretch out generations ahead—and venture into the unknown future to follow, we have the blessing, the gift, of the history of books and of our transition into the Parenthesis to learn from. I pray we may avoid the pitfalls of our forebears—our Thirty Years’ War, campaigns of censorship, books as victims and weapons in fights not their own—and instead invent new art forms, new means of conversing and deliberating in democracies, new ways of learning, more paths to sharing. We do not yet know what the internet can or will be. But we do know what the book is. We have it as our standard to judge against. Let the book be the book.

After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, an underground joke from my Moscow youth declared, the Politburo found three envelopes on the Soviet dictator’s desk. The first, inscribed “Open after my death,” contained a letter telling his successors to place his body next to Lenin’s in the Red Square Mausoleum. “Open when things get bad,” read the second envelope, and the note inside said, “Blame everything on me!” The third envelope, marked “Open when things get really bad,” commanded, “Do as I did!”

Things must be really bad for Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he is resorting to one of Stalin’s preferred ways of holding on to power: appealing to anti-Semitism. Recently, Putin has made a series of remarks dwelling on the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. And in a discussion at an economic forum earlier this month, Putin mocked Anatoly Chubais, a half-Jewish former Kremlin adviser who fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year and is reportedly living in Israel. “He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais,” Putin said, using his former aide’s first name and patronymic. “He is Moshe Izrayilevich, or some such.”

As a scholar who has been studying Soviet and Russian politics for decades; who discusses that subject regularly with friends, family members, and professional colleagues; and who keeps tabs on what Putin’s critics say about him, I cannot remember him publicly trafficking in anti-Semitism before now. Indeed, his seemingly benevolent attitude toward his Jewish subjects made him unusual among Russian leaders. For more than a century until 1917, Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlement, mostly in what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania, and were terrorized by periodic pogroms. Early in the 20th century, the czar’s secret police propagated (and are widely suspected of sponsoring) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and has inspired generations of violent anti-Semites.

[Gal Beckerman: What Putin’s treatment of Jews reveals about Russia]

Stalin capitalized on that history to consolidate his own control of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1940s, after 20 million Soviet citizens had died in World War II and millions more were starving and homeless, he unleashed a national anti-Semitic campaign, complete with the frenzied unmasking of “rootless cosmopolitans”—whom everyone understood to be Jews—in newspapers. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organize international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In what became known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” a predominantly Jewish group of physicians ministering to the Kremlin leadership was accused of poisoning or deliberately mistreating patients; the medics were tortured, some to death, to extract “confessions.” During that period, tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, and even graduates of prominent educational institutions became unemployable. (My mother, just out of the Moscow Medical Institute No. 2, was among them.)  

Putin’s recent rhetoric has been jarring because, despite everything else he has done, he has not tried to whip up public sentiment against Jews. During his 2005 visit to Israel—the first ever to the Jewish state by a Soviet or Russian leader—Putin had an emotional reunion with Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, his high-school German teacher, and bought her an apartment in central Tel Aviv. He made Arkady and Boris Rotenberg—two brothers of Jewish heritage who have been among Putin’s judo sparring partners—into billionaire oligarchs.

Although he spoke at the unveiling of two monuments to Russia’s penultimate czar, Alexander III—a notorious anti-Semite who encouraged pogroms—Putin not only refrained from wielding Judeophobia as a political tool but upbraided those who did. He ordered the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, to retract a statement by an agency aide who had described the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement as a “sect” whose adherents believed in their “supremacy over all nations and peoples.” (The offending official was fired a few months later.) The Russian president apologized in a phone call with then–Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opined that some Jews were notoriously anti-Semitic. And even as Russian television and social-media outlets have abounded with mad-dog chauvinists and warmongering propagandists since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin appears to have embargoed anti-Semitic themes.

At every turn, Putin seeks to legitimize his war in Ukraine by linking it with Russia’s triumph over the perpetrators of the Holocaust. That Zelensky is Jewish obviously complicates that story. In a discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the moderator Dimitri Simes invited Putin to explain the issue away.

Putin replied that many of his childhood friends are Jewish, and that they all think Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people. He then recounted, from notes, the details of the execution of a Jewish Ukrainian family during World War II, and showed video clips alleging massacres of Jews and ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists of that era.  

[Yair Rosenberg: Russia is not the first to blame Jews for their own Holocaust]

Earlier this month, though, Putin’s allusions to Zelensky’s Jewishness grew sharper. The “Western sponsors” of the Ukrainian government, he told an interviewer, had deliberately chosen a Jewish president of Ukraine to camouflage the “antihuman” essence of the Kyiv regime. It’s “utterly despicable,” Putin concluded, to see a Jew covering up the “glorification of Nazism and those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine.” While still purporting to be ridding Ukraine of Nazis, Putin is zeroing in on a flesh-and-blood culprit: The Russians and the Ukrainians are killing one another because of a Jewish schemer.    

Last week, Putin found another target: Chubais, his former special envoy to international organizations, who walked off his job a month after the invasion of Ukraine. After some meandering, Chubais, whose mother is Jewish, landed in Israel (which does not require entry visas for Russian citizens), along with tens of thousands of other Russian immigrants. Initially, his departure caused nary a ripple. Yes, Chubais quit on his own accord, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in March 2022, adding, “As to whether he left Russia or not, that’s his personal business.”

Not anymore. Why did Chubais run off to Israel? Putin mused last week, employing a derisive word, udral, that translates to something like “absconded.” Why is he “hiding” there? And by the way, Putin went on: Although no criminal charges have been brought against Chubais, “a huge financial hole” has been uncovered in the state nanotechnology corporation, Rusnano, which Chubais headed until 2020.

Russians steeped in anti-Semitic tropes could effortlessly read between the lines: A cowardly and probably thieving Jewish bureaucrat had bolted, abandoning the motherland in its hour of tribulation.  

Political anti-Semitism—that is, the kind promulgated and encouraged by the authorities—is never just about Jews. It portends rot and insecurity at the top of a government, signifying the need to distract, obfuscate, shift the blame. By twisting Zelensky’s Jewishness into a cause of war and portraying Chubais as a craven deserter, Putin is also revealing the Kremlin’s growing anxiety about its grip on power.

He keeps sinking deeper into the quagmire of a war he cannot win and cannot walk away from. The Wagner mutiny debunked the official myth of national unity in the face of the alleged “Western aggression” against the motherland. To the extent that Putin has a genuine personal aversion to stirring up anti-Semitism, his political needs are now urgent enough for him to overcome it.

In the mosaic of militaristic tyranny that Putin has been assembling, one major tile had been notably missing. He has now begun putting it in place—reviving not only a defining feature of the Stalinist state but also a distinctly ugly part of Russian history.

Residential property prices in Germany have fallen by their steepest decline since data collection began in 2000, with larger cities seeing harsher drops.