We probably deserved it. Wasted past lives. Hell, wasted present lives! Send shovels. I grew up in Minnesota, where this would be a cake walk, but out here it is like The Day After Tomorrow. Our County Executive robocalled every home phone in Suffolk -- over 400k homes -- and warned us to stay off the roads "after 11pm, on pain of arrest, because of the blizzard, except for emergencies." That seemed a bit gratuitous, given the blinding snow, the impenetrable roads, the fact that all desirable destinations had long since closed, and that most police were themselves in no condition to issue tickets. But it is conforting to know that if there were ever a real emergency, you can at least count on receiving a robocall from your County Executive.

No, this magazine actually is a public trust. It has never turned a profit in 100 years. But it has provided a forum for some of the best writers we've ever had. I hate to break it to you: lots of terrific art, theater, music , literature, science , sport, journalism , and for that matter, personal relationships, are not for-profit activities. And now this FB dweeb has decided to fire the Editor without telling him, kill the print edition, and become another HuffPo or Daily Mirror Online or TMZ or ... any number of other shallow "digital media" your generation is saturated with. It is just part of the general demise of good writing and the rise of "info porn" that the Internet has brought us -- along w Instant Billionaires like Bezo and Hughes and Zuckerberg.

Actually, this is nonsense. Russian elites are far more concerned about the fact that when we add up the value of the hundreds of billions of "private" -- eg mostly stolen -- flight capital that has poured out of Russia since the early 1990s, Russia's foreign "flight wealth" is more than $900 billion. This dwarfs even the $538b of official Russian gross reserves, much less the mere $116b on net foreign reserves that's left over when you net out Russia's $422b gross external debt. So the oligarchs are literally shitting themselves over the chance that such funds might face a variety of Western sanction if this continues to escalate. Furthermore, while the Russian gov is a net lender to the West (after reserves), many corporations have become huge net borrowers. They are very vulnerable to a freeze on new finance. As for foreign direct equity finance, Russia has not been a very easy place to invest for mos Western countries, so it is correspondingly not very vulnerable there. But if we wanted to make the Russian economy "scream," freezing new loans and the repatriation of private foreign assets, including real estate and private yachts as well as bank accounts and trusts and Russian(Putin)- owned Swiss trading companies pending "careful investigations of their true ownership, tax and business practices" would be one way to bring this outrageous New Tsar to his knees. True, Western Europe still gets 30% of its energy from Russia, and its banks (especially Austria, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and, indirectly, Germany) have loaned Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine's neighbors a fortune. But with economic growth already falling to 1% before this crisis! Russia can't really afford not to export the energy, and it is desperate for foreign finance in part because its elite takes the money out and pays so little tax. So oligarchs are right now selling their foreign shares, scrambling to cover their loans, and watching like deer in the headlights as the ruble and the value of their domestic wealth plummet by billions. They have got to be thinking: Putin has lost his mind, My own prediction if he doesn't back off (and he really does have many ways to do so): Putin may well have just made a mistake the size of his life;