Galaxy S23

After almost four years of faithful service, the time had come to upgrade my old Samsung S10 to a brand new S23. Equipped with multiple wide-angle cameras and a much faster chipset, I hope that this investment in the Korean export industry will not only allow me to take better food photos for the blog but, more importantly, shoot much higher-quality videos for my online classes.

Otherwise, I have spent most of the day constructing exam questions for my social work students. At lunch time, I went for a river run with Elin which brought me above 2,000 meters of vertical gain this month. Hopefully, I will be able to run the 13 kilometres that remain so that I can complete this month’s Strava 300k running endurance challenge as well (even as February only has 28 days), meaning that I would again be slightly ahead of pace with regard to my goal of running 10k per day in 2023.

A week ago, Bo Petersson at Malmö University published a rather sincere piece about Russia and how academics, like himself, had given in to wishful thinking by ignoring the warning signs of where Russia was heading in the years leading up to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While we may all be guilty of hoping for the best, I am not sure that I share his conclusion, that it would have been better to accelerate Ukraine’s NATO membership following the invasion of Georgia in 2008. If anything, that would have given Russia precisely the kind of casus belli that many people (did anyone say John Mearsheimer?) would have found reasonable. As such, I am back thinking that maybe the real problem was not so much that the West was not tough enough against Russia but rather that it failed to broaden its “Wandel-durch-Handel”-philosophy beyond hydrocarbons.