[Following conciliatory messages from, among others, Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama after the result of the 2016 presidential election be… - Masha Gessen

[On Trump] He talks and you don’t even know where the punctuation marks fall. And the more you try to engage with those words, the less they mean.

Attacks by poisoning are possibly even more common in Russia than assassinations by gunfire. Most famously, Alexander Litvinenko, a secret-police whistle-blower, was killed by polonium in London, in 2006. Last week, British newspapers reported that a Russian businessman who dropped dead while jogging in a London suburb in 2012 had been killed by a rare plant poison. He had been a key witness in a money-laundering case that had originally been exposed by the Moscow accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured to death, in 2009, in a Russian jail.

[On the actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war] I'm not convinced that genocide is the right term. I think ethnic cleansing is the right term. But in any case, I think it's likely that crimes against humanity are being committed there.
This is something I want to mention: This whole idea of crimes against humanity — like the idea of genocide — these are concepts that came out of World War II and the Holocaust. When we're thinking about whether a crime against humanity has been committed, or if a genocide has been committed, we're performing the act of comparing the Holocaust to current events. That's a foundational stone of our contemporary international legal system.
So to ban that kind of comparison is to try to [throw] a wrench in the entire works of international humanitarian law, and I think Israel does that quite advisedly.