Ta-Nehisi Coates

A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.

Prigozhin and his men came within 125 miles of the capital—that is, closer to Moscow than Philadelphia is to Washington, D.C. He then said that a deal had been struck and that Wagner’s forces were turning around to avoid bloodshed. Apparently, however, the blood Prigozhin saved from being shed was his own. If the “deal” announced by the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accurately reflects an actual settlement, Prigozhin has in the space of a day gone from being a powerful warlord to a man living on borrowed time in a foreign country, waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable retribution.

The Wagner Group mercenaries marched 800 kilometers across Russia, shot down planes and helicopters, took over a regional military command, provoked a panic in Moscow—troops dug trenches, the mayor told everyone to stay home—and then stood down. Yet in a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers.

The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the city early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.

In announcing that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the short-lived rebellion against Russia’s military leadership, would be permitted to “retire” to Belarus in exchange for stopping his “March of Justice” to Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov explained that the deal, purportedly brokered by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, “was for the sake of a higher goal—to avoid bloodshed, to avoid internal confrontation, to avoid clashes with unpredictable results.”

That sounds very noble, except that only a few hours earlier, Peskov’s boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, had given a televised address describing Prigozhin’s mutiny as treason and “a betrayal” that struck at the very heart of Russian statehood. He seemed to be preparing the Russian people for a civil war. So for Prigozhin to literally fly off into the evening sunset (at least for now) is odd, to put it mildly. It is especially bizarre given that in Putin’s Russia, even teenagers can be jailed for posting anything faintly critical of the “special military operation” (it is illegal to call it a war) that the Russian defense forces have been pursuing in Ukraine since February 2022. The liberal opposition figures Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza received prison sentences of eight and a half and 25 years, respectively, for their social-media criticisms of the war last year. While their weapons were words, Prigozhin’s were tanks and guns. One would think leading an armed rebellion is significantly more problematic for the regime than some tweets and interviews. So what is the true “higher goal” for which Prigozhin was let off the hook?

The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.

Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”

Updated at 6:53 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023

Russia is splintering. Even though Yevgeny Prigozhin just announced a surprising stand-down while en route to Moscow, it’s clear that his effort remains by far the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin since he took power in the summer of 1999. The story of the Wagner Group plot may not yet have reached its end, so it’s worth understanding how coups work: what causes them to succeed or, in this case, why they fizzle or fall short.

The prospect of a dictator meeting his demise conjures images of crowds taking to the streets and toppling statues, the despot fleeing his palace with henchmen carrying hastily packed suitcases full of cash. Such events do happen, but they’re the exception. Most of the time, dictators fall when their military splits into factions, and one faction turns against the regime. If all factions turn against the dictator, then it’s time for the henchmen, the suitcases of cash, and a hasty exit.  

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Sunday mornings, for wedding planners, are reserved for prayer. Not because it’s a particularly pious profession but because that’s the day when clients who were married on Saturday figure out if they’re happy or not. Should they choose unhappiness, Sunday is when they decide whom to blame. And Monday is when the emails come.

I say “decide” because weddings are funny affairs—tense, expensive, fraught with emotion. They are revisited—by the couple, by the family, by the person paying the bills—time and again. They mark the beginning of a couple’s new life but sometimes of other things too: family feuds, broken friendships, a long hangover of fiscal regret. So even if the party went great, on Sunday the wedding planner prays.

Updated at 6:58 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023

The Wagner Group, a mercenary force that is effectively an arm of the Putinist state, has been very good at meddling in the politics of countries other than Russia—and ensuring that its preferred regime either takes or stays in power. Before Wagner’s fighters became infamous over the past few months for their extremely brutal attacks on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the group honed its expertise in political control mainly in Africa, supporting governments that served its interests in the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Libya, among other states.

In that light, what we’ve witnessed over the past 24 hours has every appearance not of a spontaneous mutiny but of an extremely well-planned attempt to manipulate President Vladimir Putin and even threaten his rule. Within a day, what looked like a pretty far-fetched stab in the dark evolved into a military incursion approaching the gates of Moscow. This has resulted, the latest developments suggest, in a deal with Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. If that agreement meets one of his central demands—the removal of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov—that would potentially give Prigozhin greater say over the Russian war effort.

In the long and checkered history of possibly terrible impulse decisions, here’s one for the ages: A few years ago, the comedian Alex Edelman decided on a whim to show up uninvited to a casual meeting of white nationalists at an apartment in New York City, and pose as one of them. Why? He was curious. He wanted to see what it would be like to be on the inside of a gathering that would never have knowingly included him, given that he is Jewish. The events of that night became fodder for his one-man show Just for Us, which has toured across the United States and overseas in recent years, and opens on Broadway tonight.

I first saw Just for Us in December, and have often thought of it since then, not only because it is hilarious, which it is, but also because I have rarely encountered a piece of comedy so sophisticated—or, as the comedian Mike Birbiglia put it to me, one with such an “elegantly light touch.” Birbiglia produced the show’s most recent run, off-Broadway. He never had any intention of producing, but felt he had to help make it possible for more people to see Edelman. “You can’t have a story that good and not have everyone hear that story,” Birbiglia told me. “It’s the only show where I’ve recommended it to probably 300 people and not a single person has said they don’t like it.”