Map Is Not the War
How the war in Ukraine is actually fought, and why a kilometre of territory says little without the price paid for it.
Independent analysis. Sources, context and openly acknowledged uncertainty.
Featured articleAugust 14, 202687 articles in the archive
Featured articleEpistemology
An Authentic Recording, a Wrong Conclusion
A ten-second video can be genuine and still create a false picture. The crucial distinction is between technical authenticity and evidential completeness.
Latest articles
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Cause Is Not Justification
How Russia and Ukraine moved from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the invasion of 24 February 2022.
A Ceasefire Is Not Peace
What would actually have to be resolved for the war in Ukraine to end.
Editors’ selection
More questions worth a closer look.
A faster HTTP server is not the same as responsibility for a production system.
An assistant shortens some programming tasks and, in other well-known codebases, slowed experienced people in an RCT. Neither measures occupational replacement, nor who will bear an outage.
Running out of money to buy is not operational cover
GIBS described the production of pervitin when a police officer ran out of money to buy it. The court imposed two years with a thirty-month suspension. The headline wrote that it sent him to prison. Three sentences do not add up.
What a study says about a medicine’s benefit for a particular patient
A clinical trial usually compares groups. A decision for a particular person therefore requires, besides the relative effect, baseline risk, absolute benefit, possible harms, duration of treatment and the patient’s preferences.
Kantar estimates electoral support. One point is not the vote of the whole Czech Republic
Television graphics show a point. The agency states a statistical error around it. A headline sometimes keeps the point and discards the uncertainty. An estimate for a defined population then becomes an overly certain judgment about the entire country.
History Is Not Written Only by the Victors. It Is Also Shaped by What Survived.
The past is not the archive. An archive is a fragment that survived literacy, material decay, war, censorship, archival selection, translation and interpretation.
"Up to five years" is not the sentence imposed. A suspended sentence is not an acquittal.
A statutory range, a headline, a suspended sentence, a ban on activity and dismissal from the corps do not add up to one bowl of justice. The law keeps them apart — and in a prosecution there is not yet anything to compare.
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