Niccolo Soldo

Apr 21, 2024

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Last night, the US House of Representatives passed a $95 billion aid package of which $61 billion is earmarked for helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia. Despite four months of stalling this bill, the GOP leadership caved in and the inevitable came to pass.

The net effect of this new aid package for Ukraine will be to prolong the war ravaging that country, and to delay the also inevitable defeat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the battlefield. $61 billion can buy a lot of weaponry, but it cannot plug manpower holes that even the new conscription law that the Ukrainian government passed recently will attempt to do. This new package might just enough to stall a complete collapse of Ukraine’s defense, something that is of a critical interest to the USA. The Americans can accept a tactical Russian victory in Ukraine, but a strategic victory would harm both the USA’s and NATO’s prestige. This cannot be allowed to happen.

For the Ukrainians, this stay of execution might be initial cause for celebration, but they must realize that their dreams of evicting Russia from Ukrainian soil are further and further out of reach. The maximalist objectives being argued for in western media this time last year now seem like a joke in retrospect, especially after the disastrous “Summer Counteroffensive”. Some had urged Ukraine to open up negotiations with Russia on the eve of that failed effort in order to “negotiate from a position of strength”. Time is clearly not on Ukraine’s side, and the amount of time that they can buy with each new injection of money from the West shrinks going forward.

When this conflict is resolved (or more likely, frozen), the Ukrainians are not going to be in a better position than they were on February 23, 2022, the day before the Russian invasion. In fact, they will be in a much, much worse position in many aspects. This is why it is a tragedy for them that they secret peace talks of spring 2022 failed just as they were about to be successfully concluded.

The existence of these talks and the level of success that they had achieved was for a long time dismissed as “fake” or “embellished” in western media. As always, the truth eventually does “out”, as this long look at those negotiations from Foreign Affairs Magazine describes to us in detail:

What happened on the battlefield is relatively well understood. What is less understood is the simultaneous intense diplomacy involving Moscow, Kyiv, and a host of other actors, which could have resulted in a settlement just weeks after the war began.

By the end of March 2022, a series of in-person meetings in Belarus and Turkey and virtual engagements over video conference had produced the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, which described a framework for a settlement. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators then began working on the text of a treaty, making substantial progress toward an agreement. But in May, the talks broke off. The war raged on and has since cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

The methodology:

To shed light on this often overlooked but critical episode in the war, we have examined draft agreements exchanged between the two sides, some details of which have not been reported previously. We have also conducted interviews with several participants in the talks as well as with officials serving at the time in key Western governments, to whom we have granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters. And we have reviewed numerous contemporaneous and more recent interviews with and statements by Ukrainian and Russian officials who were serving at the time of the talks. Most of these are available on YouTube but are not in English and thus not widely known in the West. Finally, we scrutinized the timeline of events from the start of the invasion through the end of May, when talks broke down.

Now check out this incredible concession:

When we put all these pieces together, what we found is surprising—and could have significant implications for future diplomatic efforts to end the war.

Some observers and officials (including, most prominently, Russian President Vladimir Putin) have claimed that there was a deal on the table that would have ended the war but that the Ukrainians walked away from it because of a combination of pressure from their Western patrons and Kyiv’s own hubristic assumptions about Russian military weakness. Others have dismissed the significance of the talks entirely, claiming that the parties were merely going through the motions and buying time for battlefield realignments or that the draft agreements were unserious.

Although those interpretations contain kernels of truth, they obscure more than they illuminate. There was no single smoking gun; this story defies simple explanations. Further, such monocausal accounts elide completely a fact that, in retrospect, seems extraordinary: in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.

This is quite the concession after two years of denials. Even more importantly, it goes to show that what Ukraine was being offered then is now off of the table and out of reach for the Ukrainians.

Here’s how the authors explain its failure:

A final agreement proved elusive, however, for a number of reasons. Kyiv’s Western partners were reluctant to be drawn into a negotiation with Russia, particularly one that would have created new commitments for them to ensure Ukraine’s security. The public mood in Ukraine hardened with the discovery of Russian atrocities at Irpin and Bucha. And with the failure of Russia’s encirclement of Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky became more confident that, with sufficient Western support, he could win the war on the battlefield. Finally, although the parties’ attempt to resolve long-standing disputes over the security architecture offered the prospect of a lasting resolution to the war and enduring regional stability, they aimed too high, too soon. They tried to deliver an overarching settlement even as a basic cease-fire proved out of reach.

After the failure of the Russian attempt at “state decapitation”, the Russians immediately began to talk to the Ukrainians via a negotiating team:

Yet days after the invasion began, Moscow began probing to find grounds for a compromise. A war Putin expected to be a cakewalk was already proving anything but, and this early openness to talking suggests he appears to have already abandoned the idea of outright regime change. Zelensky, as he had before the war, voiced an immediate interest in a personal meeting with Putin. Though he refused to talk directly with Zelensky, Putin did appoint a negotiating team. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko played the part of mediator.

The Russians grew increasingly conciliatory:

At the first meeting, the Russians presented a set of harsh conditions, effectively demanding Ukraine’s capitulation. This was a nonstarter. But as Moscow’s position on the battlefield continued to deteriorate, its positions at the negotiating table became less demanding. So on March 3 and March 7, the parties held a second and third round of talks, this time in Kamyanyuki, Belarus, just across the border from Poland. The Ukrainian delegation presented demands of their own: an immediate cease-fire and the establishment of humanitarian corridors that would allow civilians to safely leave the war zone. It was during the third round of talks that the Russians and the Ukrainians appear to have examined drafts for the first time. According to Medinsky, these were Russian drafts, which Medinsky’s delegation brought from Moscow and which probably reflected Moscow’s insistence on Ukraine’s neutral status.

The Ukrainians sought ironclad security guarantees from the West in return for it being a neutral state:

What Kuleba seemed to have in mind was a multilateral security guarantee, an arrangement whereby competing powers commit to the security of a third state, usually on the condition that it will remain unaligned with any of the guarantors. Such agreements had mostly fallen out of favor after the Cold War. Whereas alliances such as NATO intend to maintain collective defense against a common enemy, multilateral security guarantees are designed to prevent conflict among the guarantors over the alignment of the guaranteed state, and by extension to ensure that state’s security.

The problem from a western perspective:

To put a finer point on it: if the United States and its allies were unwilling to provide Ukraine such guarantees (for example, in the form of NATO membership) before the war, why would they do so after Russia had so vividly demonstrated its willingness to attack Ukraine? The Ukrainian negotiators developed an answer to this question, but in the end, it didn’t persuade their risk-averse Western colleagues. Kyiv’s position was that, as the emerging guarantees concept implied, Russia would be a guarantor, too, which would mean Moscow essentially agreed that the other guarantors would be obliged to intervene if it attacked again. In other words, if Moscow accepted that any future aggression against Ukraine would mean a war between Russia and the United States, it would be no more inclined to attack Ukraine again than it would be to attack a NATO ally.

The breakthrough in negotiations that took place on March 29, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey:

There, they appeared to have achieved a breakthrough. After the meeting, the sides announced they had agreed to a joint communiqué. The terms were broadly described during the two sides’ press statements in Istanbul. But we have obtained a copy of the full text of the draft communiqué, titled “Key Provisions of the Treaty on Ukraine’s Security Guarantees.” According to participants we interviewed, the Ukrainians had largely drafted the communiqué and the Russians provisionally accepted the idea of using it as the framework for a treaty.

The treaty envisioned in the communiqué would proclaim Ukraine as a permanently neutral, nonnuclear state. Ukraine would renounce any intention to join military alliances or allow foreign military bases or troops on its soil. The communiqué listed as possible guarantors the permanent members of the UN Security Council (including Russia) along with Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Poland, and Turkey.

The communiqué also said that if Ukraine came under attack and requested assistance, all guarantor states would be obliged, following consultations with Ukraine and among themselves, to provide assistance to Ukraine to restore its security. Remarkably, these obligations were spelled out with much greater precision than NATO’s Article 5: imposing a no-fly zone, supplying weapons, or directly intervening with the guarantor state’s own military force.

and

Although Ukraine would be permanently neutral under the proposed framework, Kyiv’s path to EU membership would be left open, and the guarantor states (including Russia) would explicitly “confirm their intention to facilitate Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.” This was nothing short of extraordinary: in 2013, Putin had put intense pressure on Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to back out of a mere association agreement with the EU. Now, Russia was agreeing to “facilitate” Ukraine’s full accession to the EU.

In the end it proved all for naught.

Click here to read the rest of this fascinating history.

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Neither of the two faces above need an introduction, but for the few of you that actually do, you can check out my interview with Curtis Yarvin (the face on the left) here. I also interviewed Christopher Rufo (the face on the right) here. I am friendly with both of them and like them too. I have also spent time with them in person to get to know them on a more personal level.

Curt describes himself as a “radical monarchist”. He is of the strong belief that it is impossible to right the ship called “The United States of America” using the available, legal tools at hand because it simply cannot do so due to its founding principles and its own nature, among many other factors. He sees the concentration of power in a tiny circle answerable to an absolutist monarch as the best avenue for reforming the country. To many, it sounds like the ravings of a fantasist.

Chris describes himself as a “conservative”. He is of the strong belief that a “counter-revolution” can take place in the USA to correct the path of the country and return it onto its proper trajectory. He draws inspiration from many historical American figures, particularly the Founding Fathers, who he elevates to a significant position of prominence.

Recently, Curt has drawn the ire of many for criticizing Rufo’s activism as being little more than pinpricks, utterly inconsequential in the bigger picture. Because of this, IM-1776 decided to host an exchange between the two, one that is both a fun read, and a rowdy one as well. A lot of it is intellectual inside baseball, so I’ll excerpt some of the more fun highlights for your reading pleasure:

Yarvin: A conservative is someone who thinks our national story has gone off the rails. The windows are closed, but he feels a terrible bump and clatter under his seat, and a most untrainlike tilt to the passenger carriage. Everything is in slow motion. He cannot avoid the feeling that he is no longer traveling into the future – but plunging, terribly, into some unfathomable ravine.

If you are a conservative, whether you have asked yourself this specific question or not, you must have some idea of (a) when our country went off the rails, (b) how far we are from those rails, and (c) what kind of political force would be required to get us back on track.

Most conservatives’ instinctive answer is probably: (a) maybe 1963 or so, (b) not far, and (c) a conventional railway crane – a Republican President, House and Senate, and a Supreme Court majority. No RINOs or squishes please! With this gear and a good engineering team, free from grifters, cowards, climbers, neocons, etc, we can hoist the locomotive back on track, make Washington work for America again, and keep traveling toward our real destiny.

I am not a conservative. I am a radical – a radical monarchist. I believe there are no rails – and never were any. America has no manifest destiny. Her constitution was not divinely inspired. No special providence was involved in her founding, nor has she discovered any unique principle of human governance. Nor can any theory of historical determinism, whether liberal, Marxist or libertarian, explain, predict or guarantee her future – which, like all future history, is a contingent and unwritten blank page in the hands of men only.

And while she is indeed plunging into a ravine, every realistic way to save her starts with centralizing all sovereign power in a single person – or at most a small team. This historically normal political structure is the appropriate way to terminate a failed experiment in political science, which appeared to work only because it started off with an amazing population in an empty continent on the threshold of an industrial revolution.

Quite cynical!

Rufo: We also have a deep disagreement over the nature of history. You argue that there are no rails, no destiny, no divinity, and nothing beyond human contingency. This nihilistic argument creates considerable problems for you because it eliminates all possibility of making normative judgments. What is the ground of your convictions? What is the telos of your political system? And, if America is ordinary, contingent, and accidental, why care about its future at all?

My conviction is that there is a logical structure to human nature and, consequently, a structure of political order. The American founders were not ordinary politicians, but men of extraordinary vision and virtue who solved the core political problem posed by classical political philosophy and thereby created the most secure, free, and virtuous republic in history, with unprecedented innovations in commerce, technology, and the arts. You ridicule the category of “problems to be solved,” but pragmatism is the Anglo-American political spirit.

I see in your pessimism an excuse for inaction. I am grateful that you recognize that my work is valuable in “revealing the enemy” and that “brave and capable men can fight it.” This is enough. I have no illusion that my work alone will topple the regime. But I am doing what I can to contribute to that possibility in the future. Small victories yield new insights and open up new lines of action. Politics is not an abstraction; real-world fights generate greater practical knowledge than idle fantasies.

You sneer about “eleven staffers laid off at the University of Florida,” which I cannot help but find puzzling. In fact, we abolished all public university DEI departments in multiple states, poisoned the concept of DEI in the realm of public opinion, and sent the private DEI industry into contraction, with prominent firms slashing DEI programs to the bone. This is only a beginning, of course, but there will always be a beginning — and it is better to fight, win, and build in small succession than to speculate about some future cataclysm.

American history teaches us that every revolution, or counter-revolution, begins with a “break in the trendline.” Well into the 1770s, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty despaired that the fight with the Crown would never come. But they patiently seeded the ground, disseminated their propaganda, established their small conspiracies, and drew the British into a series of dramatic fights. It was because of that work they were ready when the moment came able to turn a triviality — three hundred crates of spilt tea — into a world-historical event.

You assert that you’re a radical. But who is really the radical here? As we both know, the word “radical” means striking at the roots, which is earthly, tangible, physical work. Your work, while providing valuable concepts and metaphors, is not grounded in experience. It is ethereal, rather than earthly; literature, rather than politics. You are not digging to the roots, but grasping at clouds.

For those of you who enjoy these types of back-and-forths, click here to read the rest.

For those wondering where I stand in this debate: I believe that Chris is doing some incredible work but I tend to side with Curt’s larger picture view and conclude that the USA is a liberal construct and that it must complete that trajectory.

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Lately, people have given me some gentle criticism that I am “too negative” and a “constant downer”. I get that some people feel this way, even though I don’t intend to come across in this manner via my writing. I may be a cynic since birth, but I am not a defeatist. I simply feel that understanding the reality of any situation is the best way to approach it, even if it can seem demoralizing.

With that in mind, I will make an effort to share more “feelgood” content in the weekend SCR going forward. Hopefully I pull it off, but there are no guarantees.

Without further ado, I present to you a very, very long and very, very thorough look at some modern days heroes: the thousand or so people who permanently live aboard ocean ships in order to fix damaged undersea cables as quickly as humanly possible to keep global communication flowing:

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data. 

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”

Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

Thank God for built-in redundancies:

Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

What kind of people do this thankless work?

Others come to the field from merchant navies, marine construction, cable engineering, geology, optics, or other tangentially related disciplines. When Fumihide Kobayashi, the submersible operator — a tall and solidly built man from the mountain region of Nagano — joined KCS at the age of 20, he thought he would be working on ship maintenance, not working aboard a maintenance ship. He had never been on a boat before, but Hirai enticed him to stay with stories of all the whales and other marine creatures he would see on the remote ocean.

Once people are in, they tend to stay. For some, it’s the adventure — repairing cables in the churning currents of the Congo Canyon, enduring hull-denting North Atlantic storms. Others find a sense of purpose in maintaining the infrastructure on which society depends, even if most people’s response when they hear about their job is, But isn’t the internet all satellites by now? The sheer scale of the work can be thrilling, too. People will sometimes note that these are the largest construction projects humanity has ever built or sum up a decades-long resume by saying they’ve laid enough cable to circle the planet six times.

According to the article, recruiting people to do this work is the most difficult part about maintaining this emergency system.

Running lean:

The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet. Often, maintenance is their second act. Some, like Alcatel’s Ile de Molene, are converted tugs. Others, like Global Marine’s Wave Sentinel, were once ferries. Global Marine recently told Data Centre Dynamics that it’s trying to extend the life of its ships to 40 years, citing a lack of money. One out of 4 repair ships have already passed that milestone. The design life for bulk carriers and oil tankers, by contrast, is 20 years.

“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,” said Mike Constable, the former CEO of Huawei Marine Networks, who gave a presentation on the state of the maintenance fleet at an industry event in Singapore last year. “If you talk to the ship operators, they say it’s not sustainable anymore.”

He pointed to a case last year when four of Vietnam’s five subsea cables went down, slowing the internet to a crawl. The cables hadn’t fallen victim to some catastrophic event. It was just the usual entropy of fishing, shipping, and technical failure. But with nearby ships already busy on other repairs, the cables didn’t get fixed for six months. (One promptly broke again.)

Now check this out:

But perhaps a greater threat to the industry’s long-term survival is that the people, like the ships, are getting old. In a profession learned almost entirely on the job, people take longer to train than ships to build.

Another coming competency crisis?

This was a fascinating read. Click here to read it in its entirety.

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The following essay has a sub-header which states:

You might scoff at it (I certainly did), but it’s worth reading to understand what that side of the political aisle is thinking when it uses such flowery language that immediately opens itself up to mockery.

The author of this essay is half-French and half North African Arab, and his focus is on the physical ailments that he, along with many other North Africans in France, have been afflicted with while living in that country, and why they are “not understood”.

I desperately wanted to blend in, to be a version of what I thought was ‘normal’. But my afflictions made this even harder. They formed a compact repertoire encompassing flu- and cold-like infections that regularly left me coughing until my ribs burned. For a time, I was littered with disfiguring cold sores.

Doctors, friends, even family members dismissed my self-diagnoses, insisting on the familiarly nebulous term of ‘virus’. Oh, it’s just a virus, they would say, hoping that would diminish my worry. But it only sparked my curiosity. Which virus? Does it have a name? Can I get tested? Why does it come for me, specifically and regularly, and not for any of my white friends?

While other children were building pillow forts, I developed health protocols – food, vitamins, herbs – and a sixth sense for detecting signs of illness. When the virus came, I deployed my arsenal of potions and remedies. When its force caught me off guard, I would let myself drift into a haze. I feared nights the most and I would rarely dare to check what was underneath my bed.

The history of this collection of ailments:

The chronic condition I experienced resembled one that was named long before I was born. In 1952, the 27-year-old Frantz Fanon had just published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, his controversial and rejected doctoral thesis on the effects of racism on health. Fanon had been interning at Saint-Alban hospital in southern France when he soon noticed that medical personnel often overlooked and minimised the concern of North African patients. At that time, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (where my father was born) were either French colonies or protectorates, and these patients were first-generation migrants, men who had crossed the Mediterranean Sea in the aftermath of the Second World War to rebuild metropolitan France. Life wasn’t easy for them. Most lived in insalubrious working-class estates afforded by their meagre earnings, and occupied the bottom rung of French society. They survived on little more than a deep nostalgia for the home and family they had left behind. And they shared similar symptoms of an unnamed illness. From Fanon’s clinical observations – which would influence his hugely influential book and propel him to join Algeria’s Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital – he wrote a seminal article exposing a common set of symptoms of what he called the ‘North African syndrome’.

North Africans complained of elusive pain. Their descriptions, according to French doctors, were unreliable. It seemed that they lied about or exaggerated their ailments, becoming nothing more than a medical inconvenience. But Fanon took the time to listen. On traditional grounds, their pain was hardly explicable. They ‘arrive enveloped in vagueness’, Fanon wrote and, apart from rare cases, they presented no physical lesions. It hurt ‘everywhere’ and nowhere specifically. Doctors wanted to diagnose them in order to properly administer medicine, but the patients became irritated by all the questioning because their suffering was right there, almost unbearably self-evident to describe. ‘It hurts’ – but what is the nature of this it?

Fanon’s theory:

Fanon theorised that the physical pain endured by the North African migrants was an avatar of a deeply rooted alienation, a manifestation of depersonalisation. He analysed their shared complaints of physical suffering as a ‘theory of inhumanity’:

Without a family, without love, without human relations, without communion with the group, the first encounter with himself will occur in a neurotic mode, in a pathological mode; he will feel himself emptied, without life, in a bodily struggle with death, a death on this side of death, a death in life – and what is more pathetic than this man with robust muscles who tells us in his truly broken voice, ‘Doctor, I’m going to die’?

The North African workers struggled to articulate their socioemotional deficit, etched in colonial violence and uprootedness. Fanon recommended collectively working on the ‘meaning of a home’ to address their dispossession and pain. He debunked his peers’ prejudices that often equated these odd afflictions with stupidity or madness. For example, ‘sinistrosis’ – a diagnosis invented at the turn of the 20th century to account for workers’ supposed propensity to exaggerate accidents with a view to claiming compensation – later became associated with North Africans in particular: medical and political concerns converged. But the North Africans who stumbled into Fanon’s hospital weren’t deranged or cunning. They were unwell because adverse conditions in French society had crushed their humanity.

I am going to press “doubt”.

Naturally, it’s a political argument hiding within a medical question:

In the 1950s, Fanon could say of North African patients that ‘they have had France squeezed into them’ and, as such, sending these patients back to North Africa made little sense. Today, the far-Right calls for a ‘remigration’ to purge France of these undesirables. Yet despite North Africans being overwhelmingly French, they are still marked by their generation – second, third, fourth. In doing so, French society tells them that they don’t fully belong. No one would qualify someone as a third-generation Spaniard, but everyone knows that ‘immigrants’ means Arabs and Africans. While a generation marks the passing of time, the North African experience of violence is one defined by repetitive incidents within a broader frame of marginalisation. Violence is a coiling snake that chokes more aggressively at each turn.

I am certain that suggestion assimilation to the author would result in a stomach cramp, or something similar.

Click here to read the rest.

We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at the very, very controversial Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic:

The other extreme is the more popular view which sees her as an almost demonic presence from Eastern Europe.

This came to the fore in one of the more bizarre episodes of the last US presidential campaign, when the right-wing part of the US public turned their sights on Abramovic after she invited Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, John Podesta, to a “spirit cooking” session. Drawing from her performance of the same name, the event was described in the sensationalist press as a Satanist feast on various human bodily fluids. Abramovic claims it was a much tamer affair involving traditional soups.

Somewhere in the middle is the satirical view of Abramovic and her art. A thinly-veiled jab at her in Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza included a bumbling artist with a penchant for self-harm whose mystique is eviscerated through pointed, logical questions from an intellectual world-wary protagonist.

Check out the rest here.

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