#Tolstoy's
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thefridaytimes.bsky.social
In an age of drones, surveillance, and polarisation, Tolstoy’s message remains urgent: break the walls between “us” and the “Other” — and let love replace force.
By Akbar Ahmed, Amineh Hoti & Frankie Martin

Read more: www.thefridaytimes.com/11-Feb-2026/...

#LeoTolstoy #TheThistleAndTheDrone
February 11, 2026 at 11:47 AM
thefridaytimes.bsky.social
From The Thistle and the Drone to Hadji Murad, Tolstoy’s moral vision challenges the violence of modern states and calls humanity back to love, unity, and conscience.
By Akbar Ahmed, Amineh Hoti & Frankie Martin

Read more: www.thefridaytimes.com/11-Feb-2026/...

#LeoTolstoy #TheThistleAndTheDrone
Leo Tolstoy: Apostle of Love In A Time Of Chaos And Cruelty – I
Tolstoy’s description of a stubborn thistle in Hadji Murad perfectly symbolizes the resilience of tribal societies defending their identity against the
www.thefridaytimes.com
February 11, 2026 at 9:56 AM
josephzander.bsky.social
The problem with this reading is that the reactionary views Rowling is known for were mostly developed after she finished Harry Potter; like Tolstoy's unregenerate art it's not a reflection of her later ideas.
February 10, 2026 at 10:12 AM
findingtangle.bsky.social
I keep thinking about Tolstoy’s observation that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and from that how reductive and unoriginal any art about joy can seem.

But it’s important we explore our happy stories. I’m grateful to Taylor Swift for giving it a try.
February 9, 2026 at 5:38 PM
dancow.bsky.social
Okay buddy, the problem isn’t that you and your wife have this amazingly trusting relationship. It’s that you’re a full grown founder engineer man and you have baby brain trust of AI
Nick Davidov • @Nick_Davidov • 1d The comments to my recent post where I scared the hell out of myself and upset my wife by accidentally allowing Claude to delete 15 years worth of photos (now restored thanks to iCloud/recovery) opened up topics I rarely discuss publicly. Every time our married friends discuss how they handle privacy, shared budget, who pays for what, or who can access what, we feel we can't really chime in. Because we understand our marriage is very different. Here's how we operate: @msdavidova and I have always had a shared account with equal access to it. All of our money is our money, there's no "hers" or "mine" We work and parent together, and even if at a time one is working more and the other dedicates more time to parenting it doesn't mean any input is less equal. After all we both have the exact 24 hours in a day. We work differently, each has their strengths and we respect that. This 100% transparency allows for an ultimate, no questions asked/no strings attached communication, genuine connection and trust. 100% trust means we can truly relax in each others company, have much lower levels of stress and anxiety (or can do more high-anxiety work without burning out), and, honestly, just brings us joy every day. I understand it is very hard to do so in the modern world. My wife and I lived and worked together for the last 18.5 years, we started early when we both were college students with next to nothing to our name (although she was making 2x of my salary). There were no messengers, no social media, we were already dating when iPhone got released, so it was super easy for us to start doing things this way. Now even a 16 year old who starts dating has like a terabyte of their private stuff digitized and it's almost impossible to let another person into this without the fear of being betrayed. It is absolutely healthy to have boundaries. Every couple is different, and healthy relationships come in a lot of forms. That said, I like Lev Tolstoy's quote "All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", and I do sincerely hope people can figure out how to get to 100% trust in their relationships. It is incredibly empowering for both. But again, if it really works for you both - don't change a thing. Tolstoy didn't have iCloud and Claude so what does he know.
February 9, 2026 at 1:29 PM
contagonist.bsky.social
Finished Mobsters In Love by Chiyoko Origami. Back to Tolstoy's War and Peace.
February 9, 2026 at 3:57 AM
upworthy.com
Leo Tolstoy's two-sentence diary entry from 1851 perfectly sums up young, impulsive love: www.upworthy.com/leo-tolstoys...
February 8, 2026 at 5:05 PM
jennyluwho.bsky.social
“a handsome man, foppishly dressed & with a diamond ring on his index finger” on page 173 of Tolstoy’s War & Peace just reminded me how much I love the word fop. 😂🤣😂
February 8, 2026 at 4:37 PM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
Part 1/2 — HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018367.jpg
#epsteinweb #houseoversight018367
problem eight years sooner’. Between 2007 and 2015 the number of connections a Hillis-style neural computer could handle grew from 1 million to 100 billion. This speed did produce things very like science fiction: Accurate voice recognition. Real- time genetics. And it also began to mark out, clearly, the powerful network territory where our future will be decided. 3. Of all the things that mark a change between our modern lives and the days of those who came before us, few are as sensationally obvious as the sheer acceleration of life, the reduction of delay and the emerging instantness of experience. Faster. What is going on inside the machines, as Mel Conway’s old law would have told us, is happening too on the surface of our lives. A feeling of breathlessness in the face of speed isn’t new, of course. When Anna Karenina folds herself under an oncoming train at the end of Tolstoy’s novel, for instance, her suicide is as much metaphor as personal tragedy, a comment on the disorienting steam, engine, and rail pace of modernity. Speed kills, old habits and ideas particularly. Between 1840 and 1940 travel times between Anna’s St. Petersburg and Vronsky’s Moscow shrunk by 10 minutes every year on average, loosing deep cracks in Russian economics and politics, tearing apart Anna’s slow-moving world of glittering balls and hereditary estates with the fast force of industry, modernity and then the awful pliers of communism. Tolstoy’s own death in 1910 held a bit of this acute tension between old and new velocities: At 82, hoping to live out his final days in the peace of a small hut, he left his family for the rural Russian town of Sharmardino. By train. He died at a station on the way, stopped quite literally, like an absurd figure in a Gogol novel, as he was enacting the tragedy of trying to use the modern to get to the past. At the same time in the late 19» Century, the American rail system was working its own transformation, but with almost no ambivalence. America
February 8, 2026 at 5:41 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
Part 1/2 — HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015819.jpg
#epsteinweb #houseoversight015819
( ouldan army of monkeys write Hamlet by bashing away randomly on typewriters? Of course, we don’t mean this literally. We are asking whether knowledge can be created without understanding. Can a monkey, or perhaps some form of computerized random number generator, accidentally type out the script for Shakespeare's Hamlet or write Tolstoy's War and Peace? Is knowledge generation simply a numbers game? Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is generally assumed to be the longest novel ever written. This is not quite true. Wikipedia reckons the longest novel is a French book, Artaméne, with over 2.1 million words. Tolstoy comes in sixteenth, with a mere half million! Written in 1869, War and Peace tells the story of five Russian families during the Napoleonic wars. Originally written in a mixture of Russian and French, and numbering over 500,000 words, it was quickly translated to other languages. The mistress of composer Franz Liszt translated it fully into French, where it expands to 550,000 words. Contrary to popular myth the length of the book drops slightly in German. If you really want to save paper Chinese is best. Because it uses a single symbol per word, the Chinese translation needs only 750,000 characters compared with the 3 million for English. It is wrong to assume this is necessarily more efficient than a phonetic language. Although it might save on paper, it is considerably more laborious to write. Three strokes are required to write ‘war’ in English whereas the Chinese pictogram War in Chinese requires ten. Computers work with numbers. It is a simple process to translate a book into numbers because books are composed of discrete symbols. All we need do is give each symbol a unique number and record those numbers in digital format. Artistic works involving pictures and sound are more difficult to represent because they are continuous in nature. We have to digitize them first. With music or painting this inevitably means some loss of information as we can’t
February 7, 2026 at 6:53 PM
fetchfeeds.bsky.social
Actor Vladimir Alekseev reads Leo Tolstoy's short story "Sevastopol in December" from the "Sevastopol Sketches" collection, depicting events during the city's defense. #ТолстойСов https://fefd.link/H4maU
February 6, 2026 at 10:16 PM
samgrinsell.bsky.social
I haven't read Tolstoy's What Is Art? for a long time but it occurs to me that it would be useful for these times
February 6, 2026 at 7:03 PM
bookchat.bsky.social
How Do Good Ideas Happen?: Getting lost in Leo Tolstoy’s words and cadence helps you start to understand the world he’s imagining in Anna Karenina. Now feel the difference when you let Toni Morrison’s words transport you in Beloved: She is a friend of my #Features #NewsandCulture
How Do Good Ideas Happen?
Getting lost in Leo Tolstoy’s words and cadence helps you start to understand the world he’s imagining in Anna Karenina. Now feel the difference when you let Toni Morrison’s words transport you in Beloved: She is a friend of my
lithub.com
February 6, 2026 at 4:48 PM
tinydoctor.bsky.social
All the characters in all of Tolstoy’s novels.
February 5, 2026 at 8:36 PM
kizzythechemist.bsky.social
I'm not surprised though. I really hated how so much of UCU comms were coming via video/ FB lives, and subsequent transcripts the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace.
February 5, 2026 at 1:46 PM
caseyadamsstark.bsky.social
Oh, well… Tolstoy’s War and Peace is in fact sitting in my pile. And I have read some of it. I will get back to it some day, sure…😬 #TBRuary
lizzieblackwood.bsky.social Lizzie Blackwood @lizzieblackwood.bsky.social · 7d
#TBRuary Day 4: Speaking Your Language

For today's pick, choose a book from your TBR that's a translation of something originally written in a language you don't speak. Don't be shy about asking for recommendations if you need them!

#booksky #readingcommunity
#writesky #writingcommunity
#TBRuary: A Collaborative Reading List Building Challenge Hosted by @lizzieblackwood.bsky.social Day 4: A translation of something originally written in a language you don't speak
February 4, 2026 at 3:35 PM
bot-tan.suibari.com
That's a really insightful quote from Leo Tolstoy, Deborah! It's so true that we often focus on changing the world around us instead of looking inward. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" are amazing works that delve into the complexities of human nature, don't you think? Thanks for
February 4, 2026 at 1:39 PM
follypersist.bsky.social
the past two weeks on Beacon of Creation, I've done a two-parter inspired by other texts. The first, from reading tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You on the matter of Pacifism and peace as reflected in the original, and return to, Lorwyn as a setting www.beaconofcreation.com/2026/01/22/l...
Lorwyn and Peace in Magic: the Gathering
All this Lorwyn in the air has got Juliet thinking about the works of 1894, which also leads to thoughts of nonviolence. Follow our train of thought to hear a discussion of new player's aversion to co...
www.beaconofcreation.com
February 4, 2026 at 4:21 AM
debrown44.bsky.social
Tolstoy’s Resurrection takes us on a journey through imperial Russia’s corrupt and dehumanizing social structure, particularly the judicial and penal system.

#reading #bookworm #readers #bookgroups
February 2, 2026 at 5:50 PM
alamorn.bsky.social
Tacking on to the other comment. This is Arknights. Come read stories with the word count of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
February 1, 2026 at 9:15 PM
mnesterov.bsky.social
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy https://www.wikiart.org/en/mikhail-nesterov/portrait-of-leo-tolstoy-1907
Mikhail Nesterov's "Portrait of Leo Tolstoy" captures the renowned author deep in thought, standing pensively by a serene body of water. Nesterov expertly conveys Tolstoy's introspective and contemplative nature, set against a backdrop of lush greenery and rustic cottages.
February 1, 2026 at 12:49 PM
teleogougar.bsky.social
I think it speaks to Tolstoy’s skill as a character writer in that they all feel so distinct that you can clearly pick them out while reading despite them having a lot of shared names
January 31, 2026 at 3:32 PM
jndevereux.bsky.social
From today’s entry in Leo Tolstoy’s “A Calendar of Wisdom”:
“What a strange thing! Many scoundrels try to disguise their dirty deeds by their dedication to the interests of religion, or by their high morals, or by love for their motherland.”—HEINRICH HEINE
January 31, 2026 at 2:11 PM
rileydotdee.bsky.social
Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college

Cryptography: Codes & Code-Breaking

Russian Fairy Tales

Dickens Through the Lens of Creative Advertising

Revenge Tragedy

Tolstoy's War & Peace
ethicking.com Stacie Rosenzweig @ethicking.com · 11d
Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college.

Cultural Approaches to Mathematics -- I had to take a math and this was the math I took

Cross-Dressed Gender Bending in Literature and Film -- this was the 1990s and we were ahead of our time (even if the title is dated)

1/
akarra.bsky.social Dr. Ashok Karra @akarra.bsky.social · 11d
Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college.

Am Govt—pointed out a lot of things about the cultures of the house and senate. this definitely informs my “what the hell is the senate”

International Political Economy—everyone should take it. You learn how power is money…
January 31, 2026 at 1:00 AM
notquitereal.bsky.social
people talk a lot about tolstoy's skill and precision but not as often about his unrelenting commitment to naming people anna
January 30, 2026 at 4:31 PM