timemagazine

From the story:

"The notion that DeJoy, 65, would help advance a key Democratic agenda item would have seemed unfathomable a few years ago. But to the astonishment of many in Washington, the man Democrats once denounced as a threat to American democracy has become one of their most important allies in government. Defying the far right, he delivered more than 500 million COVID-19 test kits to Americans in the winter of 2022. Crossing conservatives last December, he agreed to transition the Postal Service’s entire fleet to electric vehicles by 2026. DeJoy’s capstone collaboration with Democrats was the Postal Service Reform Act, which is arguably the most bipartisan piece of major legislation in the Biden era, drawing 10 more GOP Senate votes than the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
DeJoy may be the only person on earth who could have delivered these wins for America’s beloved, beleaguered agency. That’s partly because of the perverse credibility his association with former President Donald Trump and the scandalous 2020 headlines give him with Republicans. It’s also his stubborn insistence that he wasn’t going to allow allegations levied against him in the thick of an inflammatory political season define him.

Sitting at a long oak table above a 4,000-sq.-ft. postal service processing center outside Atlanta in February, DeJoy, sporting a tailored blue suit and a shiny silver Rolex, ticks off in his heavy Brooklyn accent the details of his demonization: ad hominem attacks in the media, congressional scrutiny, lawsuits, federal investigations. Even his children needed a security detail while they were off at college. It was hell, he says, but not enough to make him quit. “I would not want to live the rest of my life if I walked away because of this bullsh-t,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

He had other reasons for staying, too. His Nixon-to-China-like efforts on the postal reform bill helped DeJoy secure a broad mandate to transform the agency. Drawing on his decades as a business executive, when he built and sold a logistics firm worth north of $600 million, DeJoy is enacting a 10-year plan—apart from the reforms—that aims to remake a delivery service that deals increasingly less with traditional mail and more with packages.

The plan grows the agency, building new processing centers and centralizing the delivery network. It converts more than 100,000 part-time employees to full-time. And it adds new services, such as partnerships with local retailers to help them compete with Amazon. These potentially dramatic changes are a chief reason why the postal unions have embraced the self-made man who shares some of their blue-collar roots.Still, it won’t be easy. DeJoy is a prickly but flexible businessman who has at times struggled to adapt to operating within the constraints of a government bureaucracy. When he ordered postal trucks to “run on time” in July 2020, he set off a chain of events that led to a slowdown of mail delivery for weeks as trucks left their depots without any mail. The misstep helped fuel reports of attempts to undermine the 2020 election, reports that proved to be erroneous but continue to fuel distrust of him among progressives."

From the story:

"A new investigation by Logically, a U.K.-based technology firm that tracks online disinformation, says the organization has identified the man behind “War on Fakes” as Timofey Vasiliev, a former Russian journalist who has worked with Kremlin-tied organizations and currently hosts a segment on Russia’s most popular state television channel. Researchers pieced together Vasiliev’s ties to the channel when recent changes to the “War on Fakes” site’s registration revealed his name, phone number and email address, they tell TIME.
Vasiliev did not respond to TIME’s request for comment. But a review of his career indicates that he has apparently worked for government-linked communications and media organizations since 2011. Vasiliev has worked in various capacities as a “citizen journalist” for pro-Kremlin outlets, including allegedly reporting on Russian military operations from Syria and Crimea. He also worked at ANO Dialog, a Russian nonprofit that called itself a “high-tech state-owned IT company,” which worked on partnerships with the Russian government focused on social media management, targeted advertising, content marketing, and crisis communications, according to Logically’s review."

"On Oct. 31, El-Waylly will publish her debut cookbook, Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook.
She hopes it will have staying power. “A lot of the internet content can feel like I put in so much work and then it’s just gone in the air,” she says. “I go back to my cookbooks over and over again—I’d love to be that in someone’s home.”"

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead -- it's got such a cinematic quality to it, it's an effortless and immersive read that goes by so fast despite being a few hundred pages long

Wouldn't call her average now (because she just won the Nobel Prize) but Annie Ernaux's Getting Lost is a very candid exploration of her secret affair with a Russian diplomat, beginning in 1989. It's all diary entries — so it's unfiltered and reads like you are truly inside the head of someone navigating a deeply personal and complicated relationship.