I linked a couple weeks ago to Stephen Kotkin’s discussion with Lex Fridman. That was so interesting to me I went out looking for other interviews and lectures of his on YouTube and found this great one from Dartmouth in 2017, the centennial of of the Russian Revolution.

Excellent top comment on YouTube:

The Joe Pesci of historians!

Stephen Kotkin is a historian that has studied and written mostly about Soviet history and Josef Stalin. This was an excellent interview with him by Lex Fridman — Lex asks simple, broad questions and let’s Kotkin go deep.

Kotkin is incredibly articulate here. I would love to get to a depth of knowledge on a subject to be able to speak uninterrupted about it for an hour and a half.

This one cropped up through Google’s Earth View Chrome extension.

The Tes River runs east to west into northwest Mongolia from the Sayan Mountains in Siberia.

It empties into the Uvs Nuur Basin, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The river’s floodplain looks amazing from the air, a 10+ mile wide swath with dozens of smaller streams formed as the main course has meandered all over and stranded oxbows and dropped bands of sediment.

✦

This striking image shows sediment flow from the Kolyma, a 1,300 mile braided river that originates in the mountains of Eastern Siberia.

For about eight months of the year, the Kolyma River is frozen to depths of several meters. But every June, the river thaws and carries vast amounts of suspended sediment and organic material into the Arctic Ocean. That surge of fresh, soil-ridden waters colors the Kolyma Gulf (Kolymskiy Zaliv) dark brown and black.

Nearby to the west you can see a...