Psychopolitca Returns + Swastikas in My Life

Hi!

Psychopolitica is returning, gradually, from a hiatus caused by my second emigration in the last two years.

In this post, I’ll give you some quick updates and previews of what is to come.

(Note: it may get cut off by your email provider; if that happens, click “View entire message” at the bottom of the email.)

— NP

---

If you’ve been a paid subscriber to Psychopolitica (thank you!), you’ll notice you are not anymore. Some people’s subscriptions ran out and they weren’t able to renew them; others received a cancellation email within the last hour.

This is because I had to switch a new, Spanish Stripe account to operate legally; it turned out that losing all paid subscriptions is an inevitable part of this process.

If you weren’t able to renew your subscription, please try again now. It will work.

If your subscription got cancelled, you will get a complimentary one to replace it later today.

If you never were a paid sub to begin with, consider becoming one now. I have big plans for this year, and I could really use your help.

---

I’ve been in Spain for three months now, and changed three apartments. The latest is a long-term lease in the center of Málaga, and I am now assembling furniture in it. One of the rooms will become my new studio — after two years of having no work desk, this feels like an incredible luxury.

I have many ideas and plans for transmissions to come from this place. A news show, a support group, a creative workshop, a media organ for the coming psychopolitical revolution — we’ll mix everything up and see what comes out of this continuous experimentation.

But I’m starting with open-ended one-on-one calls with subscribers. I’ve done a few this year already, and they have been incredibly fulfilling.

There’s a guy who’s making a chess-like game about magical warfare.

A Serbian psychiatrist who used to work in “an old-fashioned madhouse.”

A Harley-riding septuagenarian Evangelical prophet who, in our chat from 2022, correctly predicted that “there’d be more war” and that Armenia wouldn’t be the place where I settle.

A forklift operator from Baton Rouge who just welcomed her boyfriend back into the world from prison.

A guy from rural South Africa with a dream of making a TV show that would serve as a mirror to his society.

A reluctant professor of psychology with background in AI and animal cognition — Italian, but living in the green hills of Ireland, alone with her 9 cats and a rabbit.

A New York doctor who has to decide whether a person should be resuscitated or not when there’s no relative to make this call.

A guy struggling to repair his marriage after a drinking habit put it in danger.

The more conversations I have, the more important they seem to me — even when it’s a chat about nothing. I feel like I’m finding my people.

You can book a call here:

---

Below is a draft — I think it might be half-done — of the first piece of writing I’ve done in about a half-year. I’m sharing it with paying subscribers for now, but it will be available to all once it’s finished.

Stay tuned, and thanks for your patience.

---

---

Swastikas in My Life

My first emotional experience with the swastika was the embarrassment I felt from failing to draw it correctly. This was at the age when many kids still forget whether it’s И or N, and the swastika is more complicated than that.

I would draw something like this:

and immediately know something’s wrong. The symbol stared back disapprovingly.

It was a challenge for all boys my age. But we all figured it out sooner or later.

We needed the swastikas to mark evil in the battle scenes that made up a big part of every boy’s drawings. Enemy tanks and helicopters carried swastikas on their sides.

I don’t remember “our” tanks having symbols on them. The Russian flag would have required colored pencils or markers, and not everybody had them. The hammer-and-sickle’s era had already ended, and anyway it was even harder to draw. We must have used stars, but it is the swastikas that I remember.

This was at the age when many of us assumed that the birthmark on Gorbachev’s head was a map of the Soviet Union, and that the scary stone face of a man with his mouth open and a toad on his forehead, which they displayed on TV before the best shows, was Yeltsin’s.

My second experience with the swastika was several years later.