What Is to Be Remembered

• An interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, and opportunities lost.

  Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow's diktat, spoke bitterly about the West's failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of "perestroika" offered.
  [...]
  He blasted what he described as Western "triumphalism," saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West.

• AlterNet's Ilana Novick summarizes Robert Reich's suspicions of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.
• Via Body Impolitic:  Zadie Smith, "On Optimism and Despair."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black."  Warning:  It is long and thorough.  A taste:

  Throughout Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking “black” on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.

  Read it. That is all.
• Zandar on the Kentucky Noseless.

  They're finding out now that the bulk of people on Obamacare were always poor white folk from the hills anyway, and that they're going to be the first people with their heads on the block when the axe comes thundering down. But guess what? I have little sympathy for people who thought they were gladly condemning others to lose their health care in order to benefit themselves. They voted for Trump because he was going to "fire" those people and make white America great again. Trump sold them the dream and they bought the coming nightmare hook line and sinker.
  
  "Trump will take Obamacare from those people who don't deserve it, but never from me and my family."
  
  That'll be on the gravestone of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
  
  It should be on the gravestones of a lot of Kentuckians over the next four years too.

  Yes, they've spited their faces,and now they all look like Voldemort. /sarcasm mine.
• Why was I humming "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on the way back from the clinic?