Oil, oil, everywhere

• The soft spot. It turns out there’s a difference between having oil and being able to use it. Russia’s crude sits in thousands of wells scattered across a country that spans eleven time zones, and no one can bomb their way through all of that. But to become diesel or gasoline, the crude has to pass through a refinery, and there are only so many of those—big plants that take years to build and can’t be quickly replaced. Since spring, Ukraine has flown long-range drones deep into Russian territory to hit them: at least 16 refineries in May, more in June, each strike reaching further inland. Crude processing has dropped to its lowest in two decades. So: Hit enough refineries, and it stops mattering how much crude your enemy has.
• What sanctions couldn’t do. This has done something three years of sanctions couldn’t. The West’s answer to the invasion of Ukraine was to go after the money the invader makes selling oil abroad, and Russia mostly shrugged it off—finding new buyers in India and China, moving its crude on a “shadow fleet” of hard-to-trace tankers, keeping the cash coming. Ukraine’s drones don’t bother with the money. They go after the fuel Russia burns instead of the oil it sells—the diesel and gasoline its army and its economy both run on.
• India’s cut. When the West stopped taking Russian crude, India stepped in, buying it cheap, refining it, and selling the fuel on. Now Moscow is one of its customers, importing Indian gasoline to cover a shortfall of about a fifth of what the country burns. India makes money at both ends—buying the crude at a discount from a seller with few other options and selling the fuel back at the going rate. Russia has no shortage of oil; it just has a shortage of leverage over the guys it has to buy from.

None of this means Russia is about to run dry. It still has fuel, still has the crude, and the export ban keeps more of what it does refine at home; Moscow calls the shortages temporary and blames panic-buying. The deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, announced the ban on state television, seated beside President Vladimir Putin, and described it as a routine step to “increase supplies to the domestic market.” Putin said Ukraine was only trying to spread anxiety, and that it would fail.

But the queues aren't from anxiety; they're from a lack of gas. The refineries are still burning. For three years, the front in eastern Ukraine barely moved, despite all the sanctions out of Washington and Brussels. The drones over its refineries have done more than either—deep inside Russia, far from the front.

For now, it seems there’s a new race: Ukraine has to burn refineries faster than Russia can repair and defend them; Russia has to keep the imports coming and hope the shortage doesn’t reach the front. Neither side is ahead yet, but the drones have the edge: A refinery takes months to rebuild, it can’t be moved, and Ukraine has already hit them thousands of kilometers inside Russia. Those strikes will keep coming—Russia can count on it. Which is what Ukraine appears to be counting on in turn.

In After the University, Chad Wellmon explores the history of the relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect and promote it.

Although some universities trace their origins back to the Middle Ages, the modern research university really only goes back two centuries, to the Prussian institutes of higher learning.

In the early twentieth century, the new American research universities reinvented themselves—they vastly expanded in size and subsumed the old classical colleges. In the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, Yale and Harvard created their residential house and college systems; the idea of “college life” now became central to the idea of the American university, with student fraternities and sports clubs proliferating.

As the German sociologist Max Weber observed when he visited the United States in 1904, the American campus had begun to reflect the professionalization of wider American society. Here lies the root of the peculiar American obsession with one’s college belonging—American elites, Weber noted, recognize each other by the colleges they went to. “The spectacle of each new campus craze kept America’s cultural elite attached to alma mater,” Wellmon writes.

This was when the universities introduced much of the bureaucracy that has by now become so bloated. These bureaucrats were on hand not solely to make life easier for professors but to socialize the students—university leaders, Wellmon writes, saw themselves as engaged in the “management of moral lives.”

(Universities—but really university bureaucrats more so than professors—therefore get swept up in moral panics from time to time, Wellmon notes: It has always been their task to ensure “community safety” or whatever the going euphemism is.)

“It may be that we do not teach our students anything. But that isn’t our purpose,” University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins said in 1936. “Our purpose is to turn out well-tubbed young Americans who know how to behave in the American environment. Association with one another, with gentlemanly professors, in beautiful buildings will, along with regular exercise, make our students the kind of citizens our country needs.”

With the basic campus infrastructure in place, American universities responded to the massive postwar influx of new students—who in the 1960s proved themselves unruly, with radical protests sweeping the country—by seeking to mollify them. If factory workers could exert pressure on management through unions, students—who’d be gone from campus in a few years—could be pacified by treating them “as atomized consumers rather than as students to be educated.”

Universities thus began building new student halls, which they put under the oversight of student offices, constructed sports facilities, established career counseling services, and much besides.

Over time, this has produced what Wellmon calls the current “morass of bureaucracy, regulations, and rules that manages students—largely detached from what happens inside classrooms and labs.” This bureaucratic bloat, he emphasizes, “is not an alien entity that corrupted an otherwise healthy institution.” Rather, it emerged from the “reorganization of universities into a system of higher education” that took place from 1950 to 1970.

“People are driven toward the university not because they want to learn, but rather because they know that the road to a good life runs through the university.” Prussian bureaucrats, Wellmon notes, made that observation already in the nineteenth century. As such, universities have long “provided refuge, material support, and institutional legitimacy for intellectual work, while simultaneously constraining and distorting it.” Distortions may be more or less injurious, but there’s no way of fully warding off pure intellectual work from the “morass of bureaucracy.”

Wellmon believes that the willingness to face the fact that “credentialing is the university’s primary social function” while simultaneously insisting that the university’s true purpose is to create and share knowledge has “fostered the delusion that the fate of higher learning depends on the university.” Not so, Wellmon says. The university is valuable. Disciplined study, however, oughtn’t be confined to it.

In Los Angeles, there are signs of a trend back toward more extended tracks. First, Jeff Parker and his ETA IVtet released Happy Today on May 15, with one piece on Side A and one on Side B, recorded live at the Lodge Room. More recently, SML released Spontaneous Music Live on June 26—a 48-minute live album of two unedited improvisational tracks, recorded at the L.A. venue Zebulon in December 2025.

Two members of SML also play with Parker in his ETA IVtet: bassist Anna Butterss and saxophonist Josh Johnson. And the same engineer, Bryce Gonzales, recorded both records. Could be these two took the idea from Parker, grabbed Gonzales, and headed to Zebulon.

If you’re working, reading, or cooking, a 24-minute piece that unfolds slowly might be more satisfying, in its way, than six separate tunes. It may also be a form fit for vinyl—where one uninterrupted side is almost a natural musical unit.

Both records, either way, are from players who grew up on influences as varied as Brian Eno, Can, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis—and will bring any of them forward, apparently without a second thought involved. You can hear that in “Roundabouts”: It doesn't sound like “jazz fusion” in the old 1960s and ’70s sense; it sounds like music that’s absorbed 50 years of evolution and considers it all implicitly normal.