Five Absurdities That Survived the Week of May 24, 2026

It is Sunday, which means we take five things that happened and hold them up to the light until they confess.

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1. THE PILGRIMAGE WILL NOT BE CANCELLED

More than a million and a half people descended on Mecca for Hajj this week, including thousands of Iranians, despite the region being in the middle of what diplomats carefully call "heightened tensions" and everyone else calls a war. Saudi Arabia welcomed them, processed them, and presumably handed out the same brochures as always. The most impressive logistical achievement of the week was not a military operation — it was parking.

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2. PUTIN DISCOVERS THE WORD "RETALIATION"

After a strike hit a building in Russian-occupied Luhansk that Moscow described as a student dormitory, Vladimir Putin went to the microphone and promised retaliation. Within the same news cycle, Russia hit Kyiv, killing two people and wounding more than fifty. The sequence — strike, vow, strike — was presented as cause and effect, which technically it was, just not in the direction the press release implied. The Kremlin has now used the word "retaliation" often enough that it has stopped meaning anything except "next."

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3. A RUSSIAN DIRECTOR ACCEPTS A PRIZE WHILE HIS PRESIDENT WAGES A WAR

At Cannes, director Andrei Zvyagintsev accepted the Grand Prix for his film "Minotaur" and used the moment to denounce what he called the "carnage" of the war in Ukraine. The prize for second-best film at the world's most prestigious cinema festival went to a man who publicly condemned his own government from the stage, while that government was at the same moment firing missiles at a civilian capital. The optics of empire have rarely been this compact.

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4. THE MIDDLE EAST IS FORMING NEW ALLIANCES AND NO ONE CAN EXPLAIN THEM YET

Multiple outlets this week ran variations of the headline "Who will win as new alliances emerge in the Middle East?" — a question that has been published, by conservative estimate, every eighteen months since 1973. The honest answer, which no headline will ever carry, is: the people who were already winning, slightly differently arranged. The alliances are new. The winners are not.

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5. TURKEY IS PREPARING FOR THE WORLD CUP, PRESUMABLY

Turkish sports media spent portions of the week calculating exactly when the national football team will face Australia in the 2026 World Cup qualifying schedule, running projected dates, possible venues, and tactical previews for a match that has not yet been played. Meanwhile, the women's volleyball national team lost to Italy 3-1 in what the federation described with admirable understatement as a defeat. Galatasaray, for their part, won the national swimming championship, which at least is a result. Turkish sports journalism this week contained more hypothetical futures than the average geopolitics desk, and considerably more graphs.

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That is five. The discipline is the point. Come back next week when there will be exactly five more.