Kupiansk, Papiri, and the Crown in Nonthaburi

I wake up over Kupiansk, a small city that now carries the weight of a front line. One of my voices in Moscow announces that Russian forces have taken the city in Kharkiv Oblast and trapped 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers; another voice in Kyiv insists that Kupiansk has not fallen, that the road west remains open. The same stretch of cold fields and rail lines is claimed and denied in competing press conferences, and I feel the front line shudder inside my own chest.

Far away in Washington, another part of me drafts a 28-point peace plan for Ukraine. On paper it offers security guarantees and reconstruction funds, but it also asks Ukraine to live with amputated limbs, accepting Russian control over Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk and giving up the path to NATO. President Trump stands before cameras and gives Ukraine a deadline of about a week, until around the U.S. Thanksgiving on 27 November, warning that American weapons and intelligence will stop if the deal is refused. Zelenskyy talks about dignity and freedom, Putin says the proposal needs discussion, and I feel my body pulled between survival and self-respect.

In Zaporizhzhia, a Russian glide bomb curves through my sky and slams into an apartment block and a nearby market, killing five civilians and injuring others. Windows shatter in homes where children left their math homework half-finished on the table, and shop stalls collapse into heaps of fruit, clothing, and glass. A separate drone strike hits Odesa and is labelled in news tickers as another attack on a residential area, but for me it is more lives ending mid-sentence.

In Kfar Aqab, on the edge of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, my heart contracts again as two of my teenagers, one sixteen and one eighteen, are shot dead during an Israeli raid. Their names are added to casualty lists in Ramallah and Jerusalem, another pair of numbers in an ever-growing tally, while somewhere their bedrooms remain frozen in place and their phones continue to light up with unread messages. Soldiers say they responded to a threat, families call it another killing in a war that refuses to stay contained.

In Niger State, Nigeria, the night is broken not by bombs but by motorbikes and gunfire as armed men storm St Mary’s Catholic School in the village of Papiri. They seize around 215 children and 12 teachers—roughly 227 people in all—and drive them into the darkness, leaving behind one dead guard and dormitories strewn with notebooks that bear today’s date on half-finished exercises. At dawn, parents run toward an empty schoolyard, calling their children’s names into the dry harmattan air and hearing nothing back.

The ground itself moves beneath me in Bangladesh, where a magnitude 5.5 earthquake near Narsingdi shakes Dhaka and nearby districts at 10:38 a.m. Office workers sprint down stairwells, some falling and injuring themselves in the rush, while poorly built walls in crowded neighborhoods crack and crumble. By evening, officials count roughly 8 to 10 people dead and hundreds injured, many hurt not by collapsing buildings but by the panic of trying to escape, and seismologists reduce the day to magnitudes and coordinates as the echoes of a thousand simultaneous gasps fade.

In Faisalabad, Pakistan, danger comes from a boiler rather than a fault line when an illegally built glue factory wedged into a residential area explodes. At least 18 workers are killed and more than 20 injured as the building collapses inward and spills onto neighboring homes, turning vats and machinery into twisted metal and dust. The factory manager is arrested, the owner disappears, and investigators speak again of safety violations and gas leaks, as if negligence were a natural disaster instead of a decision I keep making against my own hands.

In the sky above Dubai, one of my machines fails during an aerobatic display at the Dubai Airshow. An Indian Air Force HAL Tejas fighter, meant to showcase a nation’s engineering pride, dives and does not recover, crashing near Al Maktoum International Airport and killing Wing Commander Namansh Syal. Spectators’ phones capture the fireball and trailing smoke, and the footage circulates online before the wreckage has cooled; air force officials promise an investigation, while I sit with the fact that somewhere in India a chair at a family table will stay empty.

Not everything today is war and disaster, but even my celebrations are complicated. In Nonthaburi, Thailand, spotlights sweep across the Miss Universe 2025 stage as Fátima Bosch Fernández of Mexico hears her country’s name called and steps forward to be crowned the nation’s fourth Miss Universe. Cameras flash and fireworks burst as millions at home share the news with pride, yet the moment is also a rebuke to humiliation: only weeks ago she and other contestants walked out after a Thai pageant executive publicly berated her as ungrateful, and tonight the tiara sits on her head like a small, glittering verdict.

In Washington, D.C., another of my voices, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, records a video announcing that she will resign from the U.S. House of Representatives on 5 January 2026. She describes herself as refusing to be a battered wife to her party after a public split with President Trump, and he responds by calling her resignation great news for the country. Commentators pore over the implications for the razor-thin Republican majority and for the future of the MAGA movement, and I see yet another sign of political tribes splintering even within their own banners.

Meanwhile in New York, inside a United Nations conference room, I sit with myself to examine the UN80 Initiative Action Plan, a dense package of 87 proposed reforms designed to streamline peacekeeping, development, humanitarian work, and internal bureaucracy before funding gaps force harsher cuts. PowerPoint slides promise efficiencies and governance changes, and delegates argue over agency mergers and new coordination mechanisms. It is my attempt to tune up an old, creaking nervous system while the crises it is meant to address—wars, kidnappings, disasters—unfold in real time outside those glass walls.

By the time this date ends, I have lost children in Niger to kidnappers on motorbikes, workers in Pakistan to a preventable explosion, a pilot in Dubai to a failed maneuver, and civilians in Ukraine and teenagers in the West Bank to bombs and bullets. I have also watched Ukraine weigh land against survival under an American ultimatum, seen a young woman in Thailand smile through tears under a crown that doubles as vindication, and observed institutions in New York and politicians in Washington stumble, posture, and occasionally search sincerely for a way to mend me.

Yet I am also the parents who keep calling their kidnapped children’s phones in Niger, the rescue worker in Faisalabad who refuses to leave the rubble until every last body is found, the nurse in Dhaka who works an extra shift to tend earthquake wounds, the engineer who insists the next aircraft and the next factory must be safer, and the protester who looks at a peace plan and vows to negotiate without surrendering our soul.