Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2012. At 24 years, 11 months and 28 days, he is the longest-serving Russian or Soviet leader since the 30-year tenure of Joseph Stalin.
A self-coup, also called an autocoup or coup from the top, is a form of coup d'état in which a political leader, having come to power through legal means, stays in power through illegal means through the actions of themselves and/or their supporters. The leader may dissolve or render powerless the national legislature and unlawfully assume extraordinary powers. Other measures may include annulling the nation's constitution, suspending civil courts, and having the head of government assume dictatorial powers.
A Jewish Buddhist is a person with an ethnic Jewish background who believes in the tenets of a form of Buddhism.
Orlando Guy Figes is a British and German historian and writer. He was a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was made Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2022.
Shmuel Rosner is a Tel Aviv based columnist, editor and think tank fellow. He is currently a Senior Fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) in Jerusalem, as well as an analyst for Kan News TV. He is the founder and editor of the data-journalism initiative themadad.com, the founder and editor of the nonfiction imprint "The Hedgehog and the Fox", and writer of a weekly column for The Jewish Journal in L.A. and for Maariv in Israel.
The State of Israel is represented in the Russian Federation through an embassy in Moscow and a consulate-general in Saint Petersburg. Russia is represented in Israel through an embassy in Tel Aviv and a consulate in Haifa. Russia is a member of the Quartet on the Middle East. For many years, Israel was a haven for Russian Jews. This was especially the case during the aliyah from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1990s. Israel and the Soviet Union, Russia's predecessor state, were on opposing sides during the Cold War. However, the relationship between Israel and Russia has improved significantly since the early 2000s, with the election of the more pro-Israel Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and the election of the more pro-Russia Israeli leader Ariel Sharon. Putin has had a close relationship with long-serving Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Whataboutism or whataboutery is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense against the original accusation.
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, and popular science writer. He currently serves as professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His first bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind(2011), is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. Among his other works, are other bestsellers like Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering.
Eliot Ward Higgins, who previously wrote under the pseudonym Brown Moses, is a British citizen journalist and former blogger, known for using open sources and social media for investigations. He is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence. He has investigated incidents including the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. He first gained mainstream media attention by identifying weapons in uploaded videos from the Syrian conflict.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book by Yuval Noah Harari, based on a series of lectures he taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011, and in English in 2014. The book focuses on Homo sapiens, and surveys the history of humankind, starting from the Stone Age and going up to the 21st century. The account is situated within a framework that intersects the natural sciences with the social sciences.
The propaganda of the Russian Federation promotes views, perceptions or agendas of the government. The media include state-run outlets and online technologies, and may involve using "Soviet-style 'active measures' as an element of modern Russian 'political warfare'". Notably, contemporary Russian propaganda promotes the cult of personality of Vladimir Putin and positive views of Soviet history. Russia has established a number of organizations, such as the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests, the Russian web brigades, and others that engage in political propaganda to promote the views of the Russian government.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is a book written by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The book was first published in Hebrew in 2015 by Dvir publishing; the English-language version was published in September 2016 in the United Kingdom and in February 2017 in the United States.
Mikhail Viktorovich Zygar is a Russian born journalist, writer and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of Russian news channel TV Rain (2010–2015). Under Zygar's leadership, TV Rain provided an alternative to Kremlin-controlled federal TV channels by focusing on news content and giving a platform to opposition voices. The channel's coverage of politically sensitive issues, like the Moscow street protests in 2011 and 2012 as well as the conflict in Ukraine, has been dramatically different from the official coverage by Russia's national television stations. Zygar is also the author of the book All the Kremlin's Men (2017), the history of Putin's Russia, based on interviews with Russian politicians from Putin's inner circle.
Leonid Davidovich Bershidsky is a Russian journalist, publisher and columnist for Bloomberg View, the editorial division of Bloomberg News. He is currently based in Berlin, Germany.
Vera Nikolayevna Polozkova is a Russian poet, actress, and singer.
Dataism is a term that has been used to describe the mindset or philosophy created by the emerging significance of big data. It was first used by David Brooks in The New York Times in 2013. The term has been expanded to describe what historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow from 2015, calls an emerging ideology or even a new form of religion, in which "information flow" is the "supreme value". In art, the term was used by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi to refer to an artist movement that uses data as its primary source of inspiration.
Vanessa Beeley is a British activist and blogger known for sharing conspiracy theories and disinformation about the Syrian civil war and about the Syrian volunteer organisation the White Helmets.
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation using approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time. More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a British paleolithic archaeologist, broadcaster, popular science writer and author who lives in Wales. She is interested in the Middle Palaeolithic, specifically in the lives of Neanderthals; and she is one of the founders of TrowelBlazers, a website set up to celebrate the lives of women in archaeology, palaeontology and geology. She is a patron of Humanists UK.
Lex Fridman is an American computer scientist and podcaster. Since 2018, he has hosted the Lex Fridman Podcast, where he interviews notable figures from various fields such as science, technology, sports, and politics.
