The Circassian question, practically dormant before Russia won the Olympic bid in 2007, has actively reemerged in recent years. One of its first mentions followed discussion of government plans to “amalgamate” some of Russia’s federal regions. This discussion sparked Circassian discontent, as the possible merger of Circassian Adygeia with the largely Russian Krasnodar region was raised….At the same time, intellectuals from various Circassian communities have suggested that the idea of a single Circassian republic could also be raised within the framework of the amalgamation of existing regions, eliminating the ethno-territorial divisions imposed under Joseph Stalin. This idea to unify the Circassians into a single federal subject was publicly declared in November 2008 at an Extraordinary Session of the Circassian People’s Congress. –“The Circassian Dimension of the 2014 Sochi Olympics,” Sufian Zhemukhov, Circassian World

I believe that most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page. When I think about the writers I loved to read when I was in high school and college, I know what mattered most to me was the one-on-one relationship I felt I was developing with the writer’s thoughts. It was fantastic to feel I was alone with a writer, engaged in a splendid intellectual or imaginative conversation. –“Alone, With Words,” Jed Perl, The New Republic

Panic, terror. From that day forward I have seen nothing sexy about any of the machines of war—unlike when I was a kid. I see them as cold instruments of death. And when I was out there with the American troops, as a journalist, I tried to keep that in mind. That as much as I might like to think I am simply reporting a story, I am embedded with a group of people who are the enemy to a large number of the civilians around me. And the people with whom I am embedded, though they may like to think they are conducting counterinsurgency, are really here to project America’s lethal force. There’s just no other way around it. –“6 Questions for Elliott Woods,” interview by Kate Ringo, Virgnia Quarterly Review