KYIV, Ukraine — Air raid sirens warning of Russian attacks are a constant in Ukraine. Thousands of the alarms have presaged Russian air strikes over the past two years. Some Ukrainians still take cover whenever they can. Others largely ignore them.

One of those sirens began to wail recently as a 28-year-old singer, Diana Oganesyan, was walking late at night in the capital Kyiv.

“I was on my way home from my friend’s birthday. The air siren just caught me in the middle of the street when there were no shelters nearby,” Oganesyan said. “So I was kind of stuck there.”

As a singer, she did what came naturally. She began to harmonize with the siren and recorded herself on her phone. When she posted it on social media, it went viral.

“I didn’t expect it to get so much attention,” she said. “Of course, I’m not happy that [air strikes are] happening, but I’m glad that my voice and the power of social media are bringing attention to the war in Ukraine.”

She says her small act reflects the resilience of Ukrainians.

“No matter what’s happening, life has never stopped,” she explained. “We’re making art. We open businesses. Guys are opening restaurants now, making festivals, drawing flowers around the holes from the bullets. This is what we do.”

When Russia launches major airstrikes, as it has recently, some residents in Kyiv and other large cities with subway systems will go underground and wait out the assault. Occasionally, they spontaneously break into song, as they did here in Kyiv, expressing their love for the city.

In addition to the actual siren, Ukraine’s government created the Air Alert app that offers its own warning on cellphones.

“Attention! Increased air threat in your area! Please proceed to the nearest shelter,” it says.

A Ukrainian government app provides regular updates on Russian air raids.

Hanna Palamarenko/NPR

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So how are Ukrainians coping?

“Previously, we always tried to find a bomb shelter,” said Olexander Velhus, a 27-year-old technology worker.

Like most Ukrainians, he said he took the sirens very seriously when the Russian airstrikes began nationwide with the full-scale invasion in February 2022. That often meant getting out of bed on a freezing night and walking with his girlfriend 100 yards to an office building with a secure basement.

How do they respond now?

“We just accept our fate,” he said with a chuckle.

A billboard in Kyiv directs people to the nearest air raid shelter.

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Russian airstrikes can last for hours, and come most frequently during the night. The initial siren often means Ukraine has detected Russian warplanes, likely armed with long-range missiles, taking off hundreds of miles away, deep inside Russia.

After 15 minutes or so, the phone app usually provides an update. It can be an “all clear” for your area — or an ominous notice saying your region is a target.

Then, another half-hour can pass before you hear window-shaking booms as Ukrainian air defenses launch missiles at the incoming Russian weapons.

“Basically, we wake up when we hear explosions,” said Velhus. “Then we decide whether we want to go to the shelter or not.”

He’s in Kyiv, where air defenses are extremely good. The shootdown rate is over 90%. But other parts of Ukraine are much more vulnerable, particularly in the east and the south, near the front lines.

The singer, Diana Oganesyan, now divides her time between Kyiv and London. She still performs in Ukraine’s capital under her stage name Melancholydi.

“We’re still making music, we’re still making art,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it’s easy. The conditions are worse, but they still do it because we are Ukrainians. That’s what we do.”

How do you know how to dress someone when that person technically doesn’t exist? This inane yet genuine question burned in my mind when I sat down to interview Natasha Newman-Thomas, an award-winning costume designer. Newman-Thomas is the sartorial mastermind behind TV shows including HBO’s “The Idol” and Childish Gambino’s iconic “This Is America” music video (which garnered her a Costume Designers Guild award). Known for her character-driven approach and highly distinctive, vintage-inflected eye, Newman-Thomas explains to me that costume design requires not only a deep understanding, passion, and technical proficiency for clothing design and fashion styling: it also requires an ability to conjure and then investigate a fictionalized character’s psychological makeup. The answer to my question, in short, is that you have to believe in an illusion in order to make it a believable reality.

When you see an actor or musician in a costume designed by Newman-Thomas, the outfit looks authentic in a way that is almost unnoticeable — and this is the point. The selection and styling of the clothes appear so natural and unique to the character that it seems as though they showed up to set wearing it. Her latest subjects are Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz in the upcoming film “Outcome,” directed by Jonah Hill. While Newman-Thomas couldn’t get into the details of those characters yet, she shared the peculiar and fascinating details of her art with me and made the case for why flying helicopters is more interesting than sitting through a group critique in art school.

Natasha wears Comme des Garçons Autumn/Winter 2007 dress courtesy of Aralda Vintage, Fendi boots, Gabriella Kiss earrings.

Eugenie Dalland: My Gen-Z cousin had never seen “The Matrix” before, so I recently watched it with her. I realized how crucial all those latex and black leather costumes were to the tone of the film. Why are costumes so important?

Natasha Newman-Thomas: Costumes are the first place where you get to begin storytelling without actually knowing someone. It’s crucial on screen because you want to know as much about a character as you can, instantly, in order to get the viewer involved and on board. If you’re in a dystopian future like “The Matrix,” the costumes pull you in and make you believe in that world and in the story on a surface level.

ED: I’m curious about the nuts and bolts of creating these characters, what you’ve called the “sociological exploration” involved in building them. Who is involved in this process?

NNT: It depends on the project. Sometimes I have one initial conversation with the director, and then they turn the whole thing over to me and let me do my thing. Other times, the director is super involved and we get into the nitty-gritty about every character. And then I’ve been on projects where I do that with the actors, which I like doing because it’s part of the character development for them. It’s super informative for both of us to have those conversations and figure out why a character behaves a certain way, the things that inform who they are, their pathologies.

ED: Shopping is a big part of costume design. What kind of mindset are you in when you’re buying clothes for a character? I imagine it’s sort of meditative.

NNT: It’s definitely meditative! I’m almost trying to put myself in their mental state, and then imagine how they would acquire clothing. Where would they shop? Or would their character only wear hand-me-downs? If so, where would those come from? Someone from their church, a sibling?

ED: I feel like this psychological approach is why your costumes always feel so personalized and unique. It makes the characters more believable as actual individuals. You’re not throwing them into whatever is trendy.

NNT: There’s totally something to be said for capturing a moment in history with [trendy costumes], but typically I strive to make something timeless. I try to make things as unique to the characters as possible.

ED: I’ve always wanted to ask you about the outfit Childish Gambino wears for the “This Is America” music video, which you costumed. It’s very minimal — vintage pants, no shirt, gold chains — but he looks so f—ing cool and moreover, totally natural, authentic. I almost wondered if he showed up to set wearing that look.

NNT: It’s funny you say he looks really natural and embodies the outfit well, because up until 20 minutes before the shoot, Donald [Glover] and I were going back and forth about it. He was like, “I’m not comfortable in that, it inhibits my performance, I just want to wear sweats.” I was like, “no way, sweats are a completely different message, it’s really crucial that these are the pants you wear. If it’s inhibiting your movement, I’ll sew in a gusset.” I was literally sewing a gusset into those pants up until 30 seconds before we shot! I just did another project with Donald a few months ago and he was like, “by the way, you were right about the pants.”

Natasha wears vintage John Galliano 2008 runway dress courtesy of Aralda Vintage. Opposite page: Natasha wears Christian Lacroix jacket, Wolford tights, KNWLS shoes Vivienne Westwood necklace, Gabriella Kiss earrings.

Natasha wears Helmut Lang suit, vintage Frank Zappa shirt from Zappa’s personal collection, Rejina Pyo shoes, Bottega Veneta earrings, Mondo Mondo ring.

ED: What were you aiming for with his costume?

NNT: We referenced some Fela Kuti images, but also the idea of someone who acquires clothes and then really makes them their own. Someone who finds a pair of pants and makes them look sick by styling them in a specific way. That was so important because we didn’t want it to look or feel new, typical, or trendy.

ED: How did you get into costume design?

NNT: I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago because they didn’t make you choose between fashion and fine art, you could do both, which is what I wanted. But eventually I had the rude awakening that you really couldn’t do both. I took every fashion class I could without committing to being in the fashion design program there. A few years in, I realized I didn’t want to sit through a critique and hear people bulls— about “juxtaposition” ever again. I decided to drop out and move back to L.A. and go to helicopter school to be a pilot.

ED: Wait, what?

NNT: There’s a nonprofit program at the Compton Airport. It’s amazing. I’d love to go back and finish my flight hours and get my license. Anyway, while I was there, an old professor friend of mine from the Art Institute called and said, “I’m moving to L.A. to do costumes on this show, I’d love for you to try assisting me.” My first day on set I was like, “this is literally made for me, it combines all my interests.” The pacing, the creative problem solving, the clothes, the character development, all of it. That was it. Day One. I feel very blessed that I found a job where I can make money and do what I love.

ED: What are some movies that made a strong impression on you in terms of costume design?

NNT: There’s so many. I actually just did a symposium about [Jean Paul] Gaultier’s costumes for “The Fifth Element.” I also love his work on “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.” The costume design really blends with the production design, it’s so artful.

ED: What’s an unexpected shopping tip you tell people?

NNT: This is so cheesy: Be clothes minded, not closed minded. [laughter] I love to go into a shopping experience with the idea that you can really style anything to make it interesting. A game I’ll play with my best friend is we’ll send each other pictures of things and ask, “how would you make this cool?” Like “how would you make a pair of Toms cool?” I love a good challenge.

ED: How do you make a pair of Toms cool?

NNT: The way I would do it is to cast a Toms shoe in a block of resin, and then put another Toms shoe on top of it. So it’s a platform shoe with the Toms inside the platform and then the other one on top.

ED: Please make this shoe.

NNT: Our first question when we start anything is what’s not cool right now, what is no one doing, and how can we use that to our advantage? We did an Yves Tumor music video and I was like, “no one is doing indie sleaze right now, I’m going to cover a pair of jeans in the Strokes patches, that’ll be so weird!” Two years later, the Strokes were playing the Celine show. It’s fun to try to get ahead of the cycle. It’s getting harder to do because with the internet, everything moves so much faster now, people just gobble up trends. But it’s creating an interesting position for designers to be forced to come up with new things that no one’s seen before, that aren’t referential. I think it could be really exciting. Fingers crossed.

Hair & Makeup Paige Wishart
Lighting Director David Lopez
Styling Assistants Margaux Solano, Tommy Petroni

Natasha wears Christian Lacroix jacket, Wolford tights, KNWLS shoes Vivienne Westwood necklace, Gabriella Kiss earrings.

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Eugenie Dalland is a writer based in New York. Her essays, profiles and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, BOMB, Cultured Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. She publishes the arts and culture magazine Riot of Perfume.

In every office she’s ever had, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has kept a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Ladder of Saint Augustine.” There’s one stanza in particular that she likes:

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

“I love the idea that in order to be successful, it takes hard work,” Jackson says. “You can’t always control whether you’re the smartest person in the room, for example, but you [can] commit to being the hardest worker.”

Jackson traces her interest in studying law back to her childhood. When she was 4, her father enrolled in law school at the University of Miami. She remembers sitting at the kitchen table with her coloring books, across from her father and his stack of law journals.

“We would work together and he’d ask me questions,” she says. “It was really a bonding moment for me.”

Jackson went on to attend Harvard for both undergrad and law school. As a young lawyer, she says, she was often at the office before anyone else — and then she’d stay until everyone else had gone home. Working as a public defender helped shape the type of judge she would become.

“One of the things I discovered very early on was how few of my clients really understood what had happened to them in the trial process,” Jackson says. “And so when I became a judge, I really focused on being clear.”

In 2022, Jackson became the first Black woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. During her first year on the bench, she spoke more than any other justice in that same term — a marked departure from past justices who sometimes take years before becoming vocal. Now Jackson is sharing her story in a new memoir, Lovely One. (The title of the book derives from a translation of Jackson’s West African name, “Ketanji Onyika.”)

Lovely One

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Interview highlights

On learning about Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court

Judge Motley was appointed to the court in the ‘60s, I believe. And this is the court in the Southern District of New York. And I was born in 1970. And when I was in late elementary school, early middle school, I came across an article about her in Essence or Ebony, one of the Black magazines that my parents subscribed to. And, gosh, I mean, it was such an eye opener for me, in part because I learned that we share a birthday, September 14th. We were born on exactly the same day, 49 years apart. …

And so here we had this woman who was a lawyer and who had gone on to be a judge, and the thought of being a judge just kind of planted in my mind. And it was something I guess I’d always wanted to do. And this was also around the time when Justice O’Connor had been appointed to the Supreme Court. So now we had a woman judge on the Supreme Court. I just remember those things being very motivational for me, early on.

On growing up in D.C. with parents from the South, who wanted her to be proud of being Black

I was born at this very, very pivotal time in American history. I was a first inheritor of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream … if Dr. Martin Luther King presented America with a metaphorical check come due, my generation reaped the first installment. So what it meant for my parents, who were now young people with a baby coming of age in this really, sort of time of opportunity after being so limited in their upbringing, they wanted me to do all of the activities that they had been restricted in doing. But they also felt pretty strongly that it was important to shore up my own self-esteem. Having grown up in a society in which there was so much negative imagery and messaging about African Americans, they were worried that that would undermine my ability to perform in white spaces. And so they carefully monitored what I watched and worked on the inputs.

On what she was like in high school

It was a predominantly white school. … I was popular. I was the student body president three years in a row. So I had a lot of friends and people who liked me, but no dates, which got to be a little bit of an issue my senior year because the student body president, one of the things you’re responsible for is planning the prom. And I wasn’t going to go until a friend of mine who was a junior said, “Who are you going to go to prom with?” And I was like, “No one.” And he was like, “Well, why don’t I take you? Why don’t we go together?” So I went with him, just so I could go and not be totally left out of an activity that I was planning. But it was not easy to be a high school student and feeling like everybody else is dating and people have crushes, and not being a part of the culture was a little challenging.

On how she met her husband at Harvard

So I am in this class, and he’s cute. He’s sitting behind me. He’s chatting with me and tapping on my shoulder and doing silly things. And afterwards we start to develop a friendship, talking about the material. And he would walk me to my next class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then on Tuesday and Thursday, I thought I saw him in our government class, and I would lean down the row and wave and he would, like, roll his eyes like, “Who is this lady?” And I thought, this is kind of weird. Like, why would this guy be so nice to be on some days and not on the others? And I told my roommates about it and they were like, “Leave him alone. He’s crazy. You don’t want to be with a crazy person!” One of the nice days … I went up to him and I said, “Why don’t you speak to me in our government class?” And he said, “I’m not taking a government class.” And I said, “Yes, you are.” And then it dawned on him that I must be talking about his twin brother.

On how she had her husband have both balanced career and family

I think very early on we kind of decided to take turns. We could see how there would be different points in each of our careers where the other person’s professional needs would have to take precedence. It’s like we could have it all, but not at the same time. And so there were periods when he was in his surgical residency, for example, he couldn’t do anything more than the 20 hours of service that they required in the hospital, sleeping overnight, doing [it] all. And so then I took a lot of the home responsibilities. And when I was clerking for the Supreme Court, it was flipped. He took time out of his residency to do research in Washington, came down and supported me. He brought me dinner at the Court.

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Krishnadev Calamur adapted it for the web.