Anne Applebaum: Most Recent Articles and Archives

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• Edward Snowden, the impulsive ‘martyr’

  KIRKWALL, Orkney Islands

  Never mind why, but a few days ago I found myself in the far northern reaches of the British Isles, standing in a cathedral dedicated to Saint Magnus of Orkney. The cathedral is the work of his nephew, Saint Rognvald, and it dates to a time when the Orkneys were a Viking kingdom. Though made of soft sandstone — some of the sculpture on the outside has been worn down by the wind — it’s still standing more than 800 years later, a monument to a martyred earl and his sainted relative, men whose names would otherwise have been long forgotten.

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• Brazil defies stereotypes of ‘developing’ nations

  RIO DE JANEIRO

  In the sunshine, this is a city of bright colors, fast movement, soaring vistas. But in the rain — and it can rain very hard indeed — the colors fade to gray, the traffic slows to a halt and the vistas disappear into the fog. In the favelas, the tin-roofed slums that cover the hills just behind the famous beaches, the steep walkways turn slippery and slick.

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• Polish orphans provide unlikely lessons in thriving

  WELLINGTON, New Zealand

  A fish restaurant in New Zealand seemed an odd place to discuss a war that took place several thousand miles away and several decades ago, but there we were: Sea bream was served, sauvignon blanc was poured, the rain drummed down outside and I listened while three septuagenarians smiled, laughed and told me of the unimaginable tragedy they had lived through as children.

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• Australia, America’s test case in the Pacific

  SYDNEY

  Odd things keep catching my eye here, simply because they look familiar. The small fortress island in the center of Sydney Harbour makes me think of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay; the Harbour Bridge reminds me of Golden Gate. That San Francisco impression is reinforced by the city’s Victorian houses, though the billboard-lined airport road reminded me for an instant of Houston. There is an echo of Chicago in some of the 1930s apartment buildings, as well as something very San Diego about all of the landscaping. But when I see a row of cockatoos on a fence — lovely white birds with bright yellow crests and hooked beaks — I know I’m in Australia.

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• The connection between Boston and Europe’s train bombers

  There is much that we don’t yet know about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. But we do know that their family is ethnically Chechen, that they come from the Russian republic of Chechnya, where war broke out in 1994. Although that war began as a movement for Chechen sovereignty and independence, it escalated into two extraordinarily bloody, messy, vicious armed conflicts during which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. The Chechen capital, Grozny, was thoroughly destroyed. Photographs taken there after the war’s end look eerily old-fashioned, as though they were from Warsaw or Dresden in 1945.

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