A field note from the media diet chapter of The Nomad.
The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, encounters, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them. They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns.
The book is finished. The Nomad is out in the world now, closed between two covers — but the life it came from never stopped moving. These pages are what keeps happening after the last page. Stay tuned. The road is still unfolding.
Berlin, Babylon Kino, 2 July 2026. A crowdfunded documentary called Nord Stream — Die Sprengung has its premiere. I went to see it yesterday. The theatre was packed — they had to add extra screenings just to meet the demand. Two independent filmmakers, Moritz Enders and Gunther Merz. No studio. No broadcaster. Produced by Ronald Thoden, published through the small news outlet Hintergrund.
121 minutes, and it asks one question the big rooms keep stepping around: Who benefits?
I watched it thinking about my own web.
Here is what sits underneath the film.
In February 2023, Seymour Hersh — the reporter who broke My Lai in 1969 — published a single-sourced account: the pipelines were destroyed in a covert US operation, sanctioned at the top. The National Security Council called it “utterly false.” The CIA called it “completely and utterly false.” Two denials, worded almost identically, from the one government with the reach to make a denial like that land, and the mainstream press moved on without much curiosity about that.
This is the part I keep coming back to. No other power on earth can kill a story this size in a single news cycle and have it stay dead. Washington didn’t need to disprove Hersh. It only needed to disapprove of him, publicly, twice, in nearly identical language — and the machinery the rest of us live inside did the rest. The wire services, the allied press, the think-tank quote machine, all took their cue from the same two sentences. That’s not censorship. It’s something quieter and more effective: narrative gravity. The US doesn’t have to control what gets said. It only has to control what gets treated as serious.
The story that filled the space instead was cleaner. A small Ukrainian crew, a rented sailing yacht called Andromeda, six amateurs and a few hundred thousand dollars, planning it all over drinks. The Washington Post ran it. The Wall Street Journal ran it. Der Spiegel ran a version of it too, more than once, each iteration a little different, each one still missing the same names: who ordered it, who paid for it, who signed off.
The film doesn’t try to out-shout that story. It just puts people in front of a camera who look at the seams. Theodore Postol, MIT physicist, formerly advising the Pentagon, walks through the technical claims in Hersh’s source material and says they hold up. It isn’t the first time Postol has put his name against an official Washington account. He did it in 2013 over Ghouta, and again in 2017 over Khan Sheikhoun, arguing the forensic evidence didn’t support pinning the sarin attacks on Assad’s government the way US intelligence and the UN’s own investigators said it did. He was not thanked for it. He was called an apologist, accused of carrying water for Assad and the Kremlin, and a paper he co-authored was pulled by its own journal after a backlash campaign — he resigned from its editorial board over it. Most of the expert consensus still holds Damascus responsible for both attacks; Postol’s dissent didn’t overturn that. But the pattern is the one I keep circling back to: doubt the official story on something that matters to Washington, and the machinery doesn’t just argue with your evidence. It goes after your name.
I know Postol from that world, not from this film. I ran into him years ago while working on a UNHRC report examining the videos that America had presented as proof of Assad’s guilt — the same instinct that later took him underwater with Erik Andersson’s drone was already there back then: don’t take the footage at face value, ask who filmed it, who released it, and why it arrived exactly when it was most useful. Watching him again in this film, older, still doing the same unfashionable thing, was its own kind of confirmation. Not of what happened at Nord Stream. Of what happens to a person who keeps asking the second question. Ray McGovern, who once prepared the president’s daily brief for the CIA, talks about what usually happens to intelligence like this before the public ever sees it. Ola Tunander, a Norwegian peace researcher. Harald Kujat, retired inspector general of the Bundeswehr, former chair of NATO’s military committee — not a fringe voice, a former insider asking why Germany accepted the damage without a fight. And Erik Andersson, a Swedish engineer, took his own underwater drone down to the wreck site and came back with questions the official investigation never asked out loud.
None of this closes the case. That’s not the point, and it’s not what the film claims either. What struck me was something else: watching two entirely different explanations for the same explosion travel through two entirely different media ecosystems, each one internally coherent, each one confident, each one built to end the conversation rather than open it.
That’s the tell. Coherence is the product. Coherence is what a controlled story sounds like from the inside, whichever side is telling it.
I don’t know who blew up Nord Stream. I doubt the film’s own makers would claim certainty either. What I do know is this: a story that arrives fully formed, with a motive, a cast, and a tidy amount in dollars, should make you more suspicious, not less. And a story that gets buried under two identical denials from the two institutions with the most to lose deserves a second look, not a shrug.
This is the whole argument of my media diet, playing out in real time, in front of a container ship’s worth of gas that never reached anyone.
Whoever gets to frame the explosion gets to frame the war that followed it, and the alliance that held or didn’t, and the winter Europe spent paying triple for energy it used to get by pipe. Follow the framing far enough and you’re not reading about an act of sabotage anymore. You’re reading about who still gets to write the rules of the world.
And it is still, mostly, one country. Not because every story is a lie manufactured in Washington — most aren’t, and the film doesn’t claim that either. But because the US is the only actor left with the reach to set the default version of events for the whole Western press in under a week, and to make the alternative feel like a fringe theory rather than an open question. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s an infrastructure. NATO briefings, allied newsrooms, the think tanks that get cited before anyone checks their funding — all of it forms a single circuit, and Nord Stream ran straight through the middle of it.
I named NATO and Fox News and Egypt’s state media in the same breath once, in an earlier note, because each is just one voice in the same wider system. But there’s a difference between the voices that set the room’s temperature and the voices that just react to it. Fox News, state broadcasters, an NGO’s press office — they push their angle, but they’re pushing into a conversation someone else already framed. Washington did something else here. Two denials, worded almost identically, issued within days, and that alone told every wire service, allied newsroom, and think tank what the acceptable version of events was going to be. Nobody had to be told twice. That’s the whole difference: most players argue inside the room, but only one player gets to decide what temperature the room is at before anyone else opens their mouth. Nord Stream is what that looks like up close.
This is the same peeling I write about elsewhere in these pages, just aimed outward instead of in. The conditioning isn’t only personal — don’t perform for approval, don’t shrink to fit someone else’s comfort. It’s geopolitical too: don’t let the story that suits your alliance, your side, your sense of who the good guys are, stand in for the story that’s actually true. Seeing clearly was never the comfortable option, in a marriage or in a war. It means looking at the thing as it is, not as it’s convenient for you to believe it is — and Nord Stream, like most of what I’ve had to unlearn, only came into focus once I stopped asking what I wanted the answer to be.
I keep my own record. This is what goes in it.