David Remnick — American Journalist born on October 29, 1958,

David Remnick is a progressive American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He has also served on the New York Public Library's board of trustees. In 2010 he published his sixth book, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama... (wikipedia)

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.
I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.
The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.
There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.
Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.