Where are we now?
Your weekly port in a storm™.
Welcome back. The other night, while watching Russian-born journalist Julia Ioffe on The Late Show with Stephen [“Pathetic Trainwreck”] Colbert, I remembered how Julia used to sign off her tweets for the day with the line “Tomorrow will be worse.” Now, it seems, we can sign off every December with a similar note of caution: Next year will be worse.
More seriously: 2026 isn’t a lost cause, even if it is off to a rocky start, and even if every day delivers a new set of anxiety-inducing headlines. And as Katy said on the show this week, we want to be “a source of comfort in uncertain times, a port in a storm.” A port in a storm! So we’re doing all the weatherproofing we can and looking ahead cheerfully at wading through some potentially rough waters with you. Truly. So let’s get to it.
Who had a good week? Who had a bad week?
On the podcast this week, we gave a highly tentative Good Week to Bulgaria, which has officially entered the eurozone. I can’t write “entered the zone” without hearing something like this. Roughly half of Bulgarians were against the move, which was not without risk. We’ll see how things play out over the coming weeks and months.
It was a Bad Week, however, for the 308,605 people in Greece who lost their status as students. The affected individuals were all enrolled in four-year programmes and, according to the Greek government, hadn’t registered for any classes or taken any exams in at least eight years, and before you say anything, yeah, we all know that joker who has been flashing their ISIC card for way too long. But as Greek newspaper Kathimerini noted, “The move marks the end of a decades-long practice – formally abolished in recent legislation – that allowed extended enrollment to facilitate lifelong learning and lengthy breaks for work.”
The cutting-room floor
It really says something about this past news week that Berlin’s longest recorded blackout since WWII got somewhat buried in the international press. An arson attack cut power from a gas-fired plant last Saturday morning, leaving 45,000 households in several well-to-do neighborhoods in southwest Berlin without electricity. Power was finally restored on Wednesday.
“Freeze the rich” was essentially the vibe of the attack, for which the far-left Vulkangruppe organisation claimed responsibility. In a letter, the group apologised to “the less affluent residents of southwest Berlin” but noted that their “sympathy for the many villa owners in these districts is limited”. A power outage, they wrote, wasn’t the point; rather, the goal was to call attention to the heedless use of fossil fuels.
The letter begins and ends with a bit of dark poetry:
We can no longer afford the rich.
We can initiate the end of the imperial lifestyle.
We can stop the plundering of the Earth.
If you are the sort of person who supports ecoterrorist attacks on civilian critical infrastructure, I am curious to know whether it seems unfortunate that the arson took place on the same day as the headline-grabbing abduction of the Venezuelan president, or whether it seems… perfect? Because of course, despite the fact that Trump’s attack was a blatant and illegal grab for the world’s largest oil reserves, European leaders have largely been reluctant to condemn the raid outright.
True, the American seizure of an oil-rich Russian ally – and of Russian-flagged “ghost fleet” tankers – might threaten the Trump-Putin bromance. But as Nathalie Tocci wrote in The Guardian, “The fall of a regime, illegitimate as it may be, through an illegal military attack by a foreign country and the establishment of a quasi-colonial protectorate constitutes a violation of the most basic norms of sovereignty and independence on which European security is built. It is Russia’s dream for Europe.”
Europeans guest Alberto Alemanno put it simply: “The calculus is clear” when it comes to Europe’s political response to Maduro’s removal by force. European leaders have sought to avoid alienating Trump since his return to office whilst all eyes on this continent are on a peace deal for Ukraine. Immediately after the attack, many rushed to express some form of relief that Maduro – vicious dictator and high-scoring human rights abuser that he is – is out. Only yesterday did the French and German presidents offer a stronger denunciation of America’s recent foreign policy moves, without calling out the events in Venezuela specifically.
Despite what Giorgia Meloni says, Trump’s attack was not an act of self-defence. And you don’t have to be an ecoterrorist to wonder when, if ever, Europe’s leaders will begin to condemn – outright – violent, greedy pillaging of the earth’s natural resources.
And now for some other, really (actually) good things from Europe
To our friends in southwest Berlin: we know it’s cold and dark there in January even under the best of circumstances. We’re here in solidarity.
How to F#€k Up an Airport | “It’s a few years old now, but as far as Berlin-themed content goes, you can’t get much better than the mini-series ‘How to F#€k Up an Airport‘ released by Radio Spaetkauf, the city’s English-language news podcast. Tracing the total clusterfuck that was the construction of Berlin’s Brandenburg airport, this is an enjoyable exploration of the gap between Germany’s efficient international image and the much messier reality. We interviewed the podcast’s brilliantly deadpan co-host Jöran Mandik back in 2020 and he was an absolute delight.” – Katy
Perfection (Le perfezioni) by Vincenzo Latronico | Roughly a decade ago, your faithful correspondent spent much of her time shuttling back and forth on a low-cost bus from Prague to Berlin, seeking photogenic bowls of bibimbap and hoping to find better options on Tinder (reader, there were none). It was the promise of “that potential, that abundance,” symbolised by Tempelhof Park, née Tempelhofer Freiheit, in Vincenzo Latronico’s book, that attracted me to the city – though once I was there, I mostly wound up feeling broke and lonely. The portrait of 2010s Berlin captured in Perfection is as devastatingly smart and spot-on as everyone says it is. Do yourself a favor if you haven’t read it yet (especially if you are a millennial with a lot of houseplants).