Day 1308
The emperor's new analgesic
Those lips, that brain, this delusion1
The difference between everyone knowing something and everyone knowing that everyone else knows it sounds like academic hairsplitting until you realize it’s the difference between whispered corridors and newspaper headlines. Between maintaining a fiction and admitting a truth.
Take this proposition: Ukraine’s wartime leadership has become increasingly authoritarian while its Western allies either don’t notice or don’t care.
Until recently, this was merely mutual knowledge—diplomats discussed it in secure rooms, journalists alluded to it carefully, Ukrainian MPs grumbled privately. Everyone knew it, but nobody was sure that everyone else knew that they knew it.
Then came July’s cardboard revolution. A small protest near Z’s compound with handwritten signs: “You aren’t a tsar” and “If you stole less, I’d bury my friends less.” Like the child in Andersen’s tale, these protesters pointed and said what everyone could …
