The offices of Novaya Gazeta are empty now — Dmitry Muratov walked a BBC crew through corridors with no newspaper left in them. He co-founded it more than thirty years ago, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for the work of keeping it alive, and none of that stopped a decree from nationalizing the printing presses. A decree. Not a raid, not a court case anyone had to argue in front of a judge — a piece of paper with a signature on it, and the paper stops existing. That mechanism feels almost quaint for 2026, like watching a nineteenth-century instrument still work perfectly.

Meanwhile Putin is furious about piracy. The UK boarded a “shadow fleet” tanker in June — a vessel built with layered ownership specifically to dodge sanctions on Russian oil — and he’s calling the seizure banditry, threatening to start grabbing European ships in return. I keep sitting with the fact that the man complaining about lawlessness on the high seas just finished making a Nobel laureate’s newsroom disappear by fiat. Words doing whatever work the state needs that day: piracy for a customs enforcement action, silence for an actual newspaper.

Small footnote from the same news cycle: the WHO says the DRC’s Ebola outbreak is now on track to be the deadliest ever recorded, sitting a few headlines above the news that Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden. I don’t know what to do with that except notice it. The feed doesn’t rank things by what matters. Neither, some days, does anyone reading it.

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