Social Media Samizdat, SCOTUS Games, and the Next Benioff?
Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to what's new at Puck.
Today, we lead with Julia Ioffe's latest gripping reportage on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where Jean-Michel Scherbak, a young actor and model from Moscow, has turned into perhaps the most unlikely dissident hero in the current crisis.
Plus, below the fold: Teddy Schleifer reveals how Twilio C.E.O Jeff Lawson is quickly becoming the second most powerful Democratic cloud-based billionaire in Silicon Valley. And Eriq Gardner previews a “revolutionary” new linguistics tool that could upend the Supreme Court.
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Jean-Michel Scherbak, a young actor and model from Moscow, has turned into perhaps the most unlikely dissident hero in the current crisis. His Instagram posts, and now Telegram stories, are educating multiple generations of Russians about what’s really going on in Ukraine. Jean-Michel Scherbak is a young actor and model from Moscow. I’ve never actually met him in person because my friend started dating him after my last visit to the Russian capital, and then the pandemic and now the war have kept me away. I started following him on Instagram, where he posts photos from his modeling shoots and videos from his travels. He was always funny and upbeat. He danced, he gave people witty tours of the cities he found himself in, including Kyiv. And then, as for so many Russians and Ukrainians, everything turned dark.
War tore everything apart–—including, it seemed, Jean-Michel’s family. His light-hearted posts about overheated games of Monopoly were now replaced by screenshots of his Russian mother’s angry messages to him, calling him a traitor and disowning him. Soon enough, to enlighten his mother and people like her, Jean-Michel turned his Instagram into a stream of debunking and deprogramming. He started posting messages from other Russians who believed Kremlin propaganda, juxtaposed alongside information from his Ukrainian friends—presenting the nationalistic myth versus the gruesome reality. When Russia banned Instagram, he started up a Telegram channel to keep the truth flowing.
What struck me most about Jean-Michel’s battle was its utterly familiarity. After four years of Donald Trump, a year and change after January 6, after reading countless stories about people losing family members to QAnon and fighting to get them back, I recognized Jean-Michel’s story: a son losing his mother to the insane world of a right-wing autocrat’s warped propaganda...
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FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 
Inside the Supreme Court, practitioners are playing with a new linguistics tool that helps decode the meaning and intent of statutes. ERIQ GARDNER 
Behind the scenes, Jeff Lawson and his wife Erica have been making new moves in the big-money world of Democratic politics. THEODORE SCHLEIFER 
How an unsigned editorial upended Twitter, presaged a new Times agenda, and revealed its challenges in the post-Trump era. DYLAN BYERS 
With markets off their euphoric highs, the conventional wisdom appears to have changed overnight for Netflix... WILLIAM D. COHAN 
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