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Dozens of books have disappeared from Warsaw to Paris. The police are looking into who is taking them, and why — a tale of money, geopolitics, crafty forgers and lackluster library security.

Some excerpts;

In April 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, two men arrived at the library of the University of Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city. They told the librarians they were Ukrainians fleeing war and asked to consult 19th-century first editions of works by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, and Nikolai Gogol. Speaking Russian, they said they were an uncle and nephew researching censorship in czarist Russia so the nephew could apply for a scholarship to the United States. Eager to help, the librarians obliged. The men spent 10 days studying the books.

Four months later, during a routine annual inventory, the library discovered that eight books the men had consulted had disappeared, replaced with facsimiles of such high quality that only expert eyes could detect them. “It was terrible,” Krista Aru, the director of the library, said. “They had a very good story.”

At first, it seemed like a one-off — bad luck at a provincial library. It wasn’t. Police are now investigating what they believe is a vast, coordinated series of thefts of rare 19th-century Russian books — primarily first and early editions of Pushkin — from libraries across Europe.

Since 2022, more than 170 books valued at more than $2.6 million, according to Europol, have vanished from the National Library of Latvia in Riga, Vilnius University Library, the State Library of Berlin, the Bavarian State Library in Munich, the National Library of Finland in Helsinki, the National Library of France, university libraries in Paris, Lyon and Geneva, and from the Czech Republic. The University of Warsaw library was hardest hit, with 78 books gone.

In Russia, Pushkin is a national icon with the status of Shakespeare but the familiarity of a friend. A Romantic poet, novelist and playwright, aristocrat, libertine, writer on freedom and empire, he brought Russian literature, and the Russian language itself, into modernity before dying in a duel at age 37, in 1837.

“In Russia for the past 200 years, there were not four elements in nature but five, and the fifth is Pushkin,” André Markovicz, the pre-eminent translator of Pushkin into French, said.

“Pushkin is the mirror of all the epochs of Russia,” Markovicz said. In Ukraine today, Pushkin has become a reviled symbol of Russian imperialism since the brutal Russian invasion and people have toppled statues to him.

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Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University.

Some excerpts; This time of year, college campuses like the one where I live fill up with high school seniors preparing to make what feels like a momentous choice. The first imperative is to find a school that they can afford, but beyond that, many students have been advised to find one where they can see themselves. Too often, they take this to mean finding a place with students like them, even students who look like them — a place where they will feel comfortable. I can’t tell you how many families have described driving many hours to a campus somewhere and having their daughter or son say something like: “We don’t need to get out. I can tell already this isn’t for me.”

“How about the info session?” the patient parent asks.

“Nope.”

Choosing a college based on where you feel comfortable is a mistake. The most rewarding forms of education make you feel very uncomfortable, not least because they force you to recognize your own ignorance. Students should hope to encounter ideas and experience cultural forms that push them beyond their current opinions and tastes. Sure, revulsion is possible (and one can learn from that), but so is the discovery that your filtered ways of taking in the world had blocked out things in which you now delight. One learns from that, too.

These days, the first thing that campus visitors may notice are protests over the war in Gaza. These will be attractive to some who see in them an admirable commitment to principle and off-putting to those who see evidence of groupthink or intimidation. Any campus should be a “safe enough space,” one free of harassment and intimidation, but not one where identities and beliefs are just reinforced. That’s why it’s profoundly disturbing to hear of Jewish students afraid to move about because of the threat of verbal and physical abuse. And that’s why it’s inspiring to see Muslim and Jewish students camped out together to protest a war they think is unjust.

So, what makes a school the right one? It’s not the prestige of a name or the campus amenities. First and foremost, it’s the teachers. Great teachers help make a college great because they themselves are never done being students. Sure, there are plenty of schools filled with faculty members who think alike, who relish the bubble of fellowship in received opinion. A college can make being weird or radical into adolescent orthodoxy. These places should be avoided. By contrast, there are colleges with great teachers who practice freedom by activating wonder, a capacity for appreciation and a taste for inquiry — and who do so because they themselves seek out these broadening experiences. You can feel their own nonconformity as they try to provoke their students away from the various forms of received opinion.

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An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that sears me with its glimpse of overwhelming grief: A woman mourns her young son.

I’ve known the surgeon, Dr. Sam Attar, a professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, for a decade. He has worked in war zones around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq to Syria, but Gaza has been particularly harrowing for him, in part because so many children have suffered or died.

He performed amputations and other orthopedic surgeries recently at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the I.C.U. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead.

“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.”

The nurses and other doctors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that Gazan children have starved to death.

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