Aug
4
2025

Hotel Ukraine

(paid link)

I ordered this book from Amazon back in December. It came auto-delivered to my Kindle on the release date last month, and I noticed that at some point a subtitle had bee added: The Final Arkady Renko Novel.

And a few days later, via the WSJ's book review, I learned that the author, Martin Cruz Smith, had died on July 11.

Well, darn. I still have the $3.95 paperback of Gorky Park I bought and read back in 1982. And I've been a diligent follower of Smith's diligent Russian investigator, Arkady Renko, since then.

As the book opens, Arkady needs to get his adopted computer-whiz son, Zhenya, out of the clutches of the Russian FSB. He was nabbed for protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling it a "war" instead of the approved term, "special military operation."

I thought this observation was pointful enough to share at Goodreads:

Once more, Arkady thought, you needed only one book to really understand Russia. Not Tolstoy or Pushkin, not Dostoyevsky or Lermontov, but one his mother used to read to him as a child: Through the Looking-Glass, otherwise known as Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Well… those are two separate books, I think. But otherwise, spot on. Of course, you'd need to add a lot more violence, thuggery, and terror to the Alice books to really get it right.

Soon enough, Arkady is given a murder case: a lower-level defense minister has been brutally murdered at the Hotel Ukraine. Arkady's investigative skills (and a little bit of happenstance luck) draw him to the father/son team of Lev and Ivan Volkov, who run the paramilitary "1812 Group". (Think a barely fictionalized version of the Wagner Group, and its (late) leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, and son Pavel.) Arkady and his longtime lady friend, journalist Tatiana Petrovna, take a dangerous trip to Ukraine, discovering atrocities committed by 1812. (And those are barely fictionalized too.)

Soon enough, both Arkady and Tatiana find themselves in extreme peril from Volkov, the 1812 Group, and their allies in the FSB. Leading to a very cinematic showdown in the sewers and subway tunnels of Moscow.

I will miss Arkady Renko and Martin Cruz Smith a lot. I might do a re-reading project.

Socialism Kills

Commercial air travel is pretty safe. But Eric Boehm reminds us it could be safer: The Federal Aviation Administration should not run air traffic control.

If you prefer words, Jeff Jacoby has plenty: Canada fixed its air traffic control decades ago. Why can't America?

AN AMERICAN AIRLINES flight from Wichita, Kan., to Washington, D.C., was on its final approach into Reagan National Airport on Jan. 29 when it collided in midair with a US Army helicopter on a training mission. Both aircraft were engulfed in flames and plunged into the Potomac River. All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed. It was the deadliest domestic aviation disaster in nearly 25 years.

A few days later, 10 people died when a regional airline flight crashed off the coast of Alaska. Shortly after that, there was a near-disaster in Chicago when a Southwest Airlines jet barely avoided colliding with a private plane that had entered the runway at Midway Airport without authorization. In May, the control center at Newark's Liberty Airport experienced a communications blackout when a burnt-out wire triggered an equipment failure, leaving air traffic controllers blind to arriving and departing aircraft for a minute and a half. It was one of three outages in the space of two weeks at Newark, where a shortage of controllers routinely causes flights to be delayed or cancelled.

Some of these tragedies and alarming incidents are still being investigated. But all of them are reminders that America's air traffic control system is in desperate need of reform.

As I said, commercial air travel is pretty safe. But so was the Space Shuttle. Out of 135 launches, it managed to not kill its entire crew 133 times.

Also of note:

  • The Presidency is just his side hustle. Matt Welch nails the Grifter-in-Chief: Trump is openly using the presidency to enrich the Trump brand.

    The president of the United States on Tuesday held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Balmedie, Scotland, to mark the opening of the new Trump International Golf Links, owned by his family (at least until he exits the White House), and designed by his son Eric.

    In his cheery promotional remarks, Donald Trump thanked the media ("today they're not fake news, they're wonderful news"), gave a shout-out to his daughter-in-law ("Lara, I want to thank you, the head of the Republican Party"), and praised various dignitaries on hand.

    "I want to thank, by the way, the prime minister, who was here last night, and who was really very gracious; loves the place," he said, referencing the United Kingdom's Keir Starmer, who also joined Trump at another of his Scottish golf properties before hopping on Air Force One with the Trump clan for a sneak peek at Balmedie. "This will," the commander in chief predicted, "be a tremendously successful place."

    Yeah, I know: he's not Kamala. But that is beginning to wear a little thin.

  • Spoiler: Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies. Allysia Finley in the WSJ: Trump Claims the Jobs Report Was Rigged. Was It? (WSJ gifted link) She goes for the cliché, unfortunately:

    Well, that was productive—not. President Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the July jobs report showed that hiring stalled this spring amid his tariff blitz and deportation crackdown. Shooting the messenger won’t help him or the economy.

    The BLS estimates a mere 73,000 jobs were added last month, almost all in healthcare and social assistance. It also revised down gains for May and June by a combined 258,000, to a total of 33,000 new jobs, one of the biggest downward revisions in years.

    Mr. Trump sniffs a deep-state conspiracy. “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” the president huffed on Truth Social. Where’s the evidence? There is none.

    No evidence? Hey, Trump has all the evidence he needs:

    Yup, "Biden Appointee". Case closed!

    That's from Nate Silver whose headline may be too optimistic: Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone. He gets into the statistical weeds, demonstrating there's nothing to see here "RIGGED"-wise.

    I’m not sure exactly where firing the BLS commissioner ranks on the list of Trump-related outrages. Even if Congress does its job and McEntarfer is replaced with another competent successor, this could have a chilling effect on BLS and other government agencies to operate independently.

    It’s also not surprising given Trump’s previous incursions on the independence of the Federal Reserve and other government agencies. This is the guy who sued a pollster for publishing results he didn’t like.

    Unlike in some other instances, though, I don’t see how there’s any real political gain for Trump in yet again undermining longstanding norms and institutions.

    NPR reminds us of the good old days: 'I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters'