Cheap shot: Not grim, not dank

Lindsay Mills, in a YouTube screenshot captured by Stimme Russlands, Moscow's German-language radio station, where the Cold War does not seem to be quite over—I'm talking about pleased announcements that the Russian Federation has overtaken the US in the number of strategic nuclear warheads.

If you happened to be worried about Eduardo Snowden and how he's been bearing up in his strange new life of exile and whatever, and I'm not saying you were worried, but just in case, Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept wants to assure you that you need worry no longer, because he's doing just fine:

his post-Hong Kong life has been fulfilling and rewarding. He speaks, and writes, and is interviewed, and has become an important voice in the global debate he triggered.

Most important of all, he gets to share it all with a sweetheart, his former Honolulu roommate Lindsay Mills, who showed up in Moscow last June and is now living with him:

... the fact that he is now living in domestic bliss as well, with his long-term girlfriend whom he loves, should forever put to rest the absurd campaign to depict his life as grim and dank.

You may not have been aware of the campaign, and to be honest I wasn't either (there is a sort of article from the Daily Beast from when he was still stuck in Sheremetyevo Airport, July 2013, but as campaigns go that seems extremely modest), but that's not all that important. What's important is that love, for Eduardo, has found a way, I suppose thanks to Glenn, to whom Eduardo entrusted himself last year (unlike poor Chelsea Manning, who went with that smelly old Wikileaks and is now doing fairly hard time, or as they say in Greenwaldian "grotesquely severe mistreatment").

"Long-term" seems like an odd qualifier to apply to a girlfriend—

1

:  occurring over or involving a relatively long period of time <seeking long–term solutions>

2

a :  of, relating to, or constituting a financial operation or obligation based on a considerable term and especially one of more than 10 years <long–term bonds>

b :  generated by assets held for longer than six months <a long–term capital gain> (Merriam-Webster)

—but what do I know? As long as it isn't dank. That would be pretty distressing. And I hope it isn't grim or dank for Lindsay, who doesn't seem to have the same opportunities to speak, write, or get interviewed, although we do hear that Eduardo helps out with the cookery.

I do wonder why Glenn couldn't have reassured us on this score earlier, if it's important, instead of waiting for the day when Laura Poitras's Snowden film Citizenfour (I believe the title is an Europäisch expression meaning "The Oven of Citizens"), Steven Soderbergh, executive producer, made its début at the New York Film Festival, as if he were a movie publicist rather than the heroic journalist we all understand him to be.