The unexpected power of fleeting friendships

From Aristotle on, we’ve learned to see long-lasting relationships as more valuable. But what does that leave out?In Russian, a poputchik is a stranger you meet on a journey who you end up confessing everything to because you know you’ll never see them again. Like the English “fellow traveller”, poputchik was repurposed to describe Marxist sympathisers, but the original meaning…