Notice to readers: We are scrapping the Great Living Americans nominating process due to your miserable failure, and hereby revoke your suggestion privileges. The eXiled has also initiated a review of our policies regarding the solicitation of reader input to make sure that a similar tragedy will never happen again. You people depress us.

In honor of Independence Day, I’d like to return to the topic of Great Americans, or the lack thereof. In an earlier article, I mentioned the Civil War era as a remarkable generator of Great Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Tecumseh Sherman, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Ambrose Bierce. I noted that it’s much harder to come up with a list of Great Americans living today. (I nominated Muhammad Ali, Cesar Milan, and the Coen Brothers.)

I asked for nominees, and readers responded with the following:

(more…)

As an antidote to the current World Cup soccer idiocy, we suggest taking 1 full dose of The eXile’s classic soccer takedown, published during the 1998 World Cup.

Here’s a little something to consider for all you folks who’ve been trying to watch the World’s Greatest Sporting Event–otherwise known as the World Cup–over the course of the last week. The following is a short list of some of the official mascots of the World Cup in the latter half of this century. 1990: Ciao, an abstract object (Italy). 1986: Pique, a chili pepper (Mexico). 1982: Naranjito, an orange (Spain). 1978: Gauchito, a boy (Argentina). 1974: Tip and Tap, two boys (West Germany). 1970: Juanito, a boy (Mexico). 1966: World Cup Willie, a lion (England).

An abstract object, a chili pepper, an orange, a boy, two boys, a boy, and a lion named “World Cup Willie”…Is this sports or a NAMBLA convention? (more…)

Mark Ames joins Vanity Fair writer James Verini for an interview on the NPR radio show “Here & Now” with host Robin Young in Boston. They talk about the incredible 11-year history of the Moscow newspaper “The eXile” which was the subject of a recent Vanity Fair feature profile. Ames also talks about some favorite old themes: drugs, prostitutes, and how the sorry state of American journalism pushed him and former co-editor Matt Taibbi into increasingly desperate acts of journalistic extremism. (more…)

Today is March 8, meaning it’s International Women’s Day in the former Warsaw Pact nations. It brings back mixed emotions–gagging, for starters, just remembering the revolting cheesiness of those fat, vain Russian TV hosts showing off their toasting skills in honor of women they could give a fuck about…and the Russian women in our lives who were mortally offended if you didn’t partake in the whole offensive ritual.

But then there was the other side of Women’s Day that makes us a bit nostalgic: Russia’s devushki. An abundance of devushki. So many devushki it gave you a headache. As this recent Komsomolskaya Pravda story on the “Girls of the Siloviki” shows, even the scariest devushki had a certain tantalizing “Amateur Hardcore MILF” quality about them that made it hard to think responsibly. (If you want to know more about the siloviki, click here. Would you like to know more?)

So here then is a March 8 photo essay showing off Kremlin Femdom at its best: The Girls of the Silovki: (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on March 6, 2008.

In this post-Russian presidential election issue, while the righteous American editorialists wag their fingers at Russia’s farcical elections, we want to hold up a giant mirror (with loudspeaker attached) across the Atlantic and scream what every sane American has been thinking for nearly a decade now: We’re Embarrassed To Be Americans. (more…)

Read the sensational Vanity Fair profile on The eXile, and founding editors Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi: (more…)

Gold coin issued by Nicholas Deak at the peak of the last gold boom

While working on my upcoming book out here in the High Desert, I went off on one of those research tangents that led me to an old Time article about the bizarre murder, 25 years ago, of a man Time once called “the James Bond of the world of money.” The murderer was a classic  ”lone nut” of the sort who conveniently appear every now and then to take out inconvenient people. But unlike other lone nuts who may or may not have been part of some bigger conspiracy, this particular lone-nut murderer–a homeless schizophrenic woman who somehow trekked thousands of miles to kill Nicholas Deak–creeped me out for very personal reasons. Back in 2002, when I was facing the scariest and most serious death threat in all  of The eXile’s 11 years, I was told exactly how I would be killed–and the details described to me have an eery similarity to the way Nicholas Deak was murdered.  (more…)

The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia

By Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

Yea, the Lord has heard thine prayers, and He, in His infinite Sadism, has answered thee: back on sale, newly printed up, is the record of The eXile’s early beginnings. It’s The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove), first published in 2000. Click the cover to order it through amazon, or order buy it from your favorite overpriced neighborhood bookseller. (more…)

The eXiled is a webzine that publishes political commentary, pop culture criticism and investigative reporting from around the world—all of it written in The eXiled’s infamous satirical and outrageous style.

The eXiled has been online since June 2008 as the web-only incarnation of The eXile, a Russia-based English-language bi-weekly newspaper that was launched in 1997 by American journalist Mark Ames and shut down by the Russian government in the summer of 2008. (Read more about the history of The eXile.)

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine are editors of The eXiled.

(more…)

It all started two weeks ago.

There is a certain person, whom I will hereafter refer to as a Little Birdie, who often sends the eXile materials and ideas for stories and pranks, without getting any credit for contributing. Two weeks ago — on July 26, to be exact — the Little Birdie sent me an e-mail containing a story that had appeared in that day’s edition of the Los Angeles Times. Entitled “Taming the Wild, Wild Web”, and written by Michael Hiltzik, the article basically argued that the internet was too free for its own good, and needed to have its anarchistic tendencies reigned in, for the good of commerce. (more…)

The eXile is soliciting commentary on the following article, written by Michael Wines of the New York Times.

We need your help in attaining a more perfect understanding of this article. Send your comments to editor Matt Taibbi at taibbi@exile.ru, and they will be published in a new feature in the next issue of the eXile, a special “Letters to Michael Wines” section. The feature will allow Wines’s fans to express their admiration for the Times standout in a public forum.

Remember, send your comments to taibbi@exile.ru

July 22, 2001

(more…)

His name was Pobornik.

He had never read The New York Times. He would never be able to recognize a classic “pyramid lead.” His hours were occupied by other pursuits: grazing, sleeping standing up for long stretches, swatting away insects with his long, swishy tail, crunching mounds of hay in that big conical face of his. And then there was that other thing…. Pobornik had probably never known any other kind of life, and so he probably thought that his day job at Moscow’s Horse Farm #1 was part of the natural biological mission of the adult males of his species.

Strange-looking men would come to his stable during the daytime, and begin massaging him in strange places. One would be tugging at a strap tied to his mouth, and pulling him this way and that, back and forth, and all the while that strange stroking would continue, and the air would be filled with strange smells, and he would feel a tickling at his ears as his huge body convulsed with volcanic tremors…. (more…)

In the autumn of 1998, I got a call from Edward Limonov asking me if I could do a favor for him. His newspaper Limonka—known for its mix of extreme politics and avant-garde aesthetics—was preparing to celebrate its fourth anniversary at the Mayakovskaya Museum.

“My boys begged me to bring Johnny Rotten to the party,” Limonov told me, laughing. “I know it’s a small chance, but maybe Mr. Rotten will think it’s interesting to speak before a group of radical Russian youths who worship him.”

(more…)

Whenever they travel overseas, most Americans are aware that the locals hate them, but few know why. Usually Americans ascribe bad blood to jealousy. Iranian flag-burning mobs? Uneducated, unfortunate and misguided people, afraid of progress. Okinawans? Sore losers, still mad that we invented the bomb first. Russians? A gang of layabouts, too used to the security of communism, afraid of the hard work and responsibility necessary in the free enterprise system. (more…)

It’s happened to all of us at least once; out late at night, drunk, carrying a hundred bucks or so, and suddenly stopped by a couple of hulking cops and asked for documents. You don’t have them with you, so you make a deal, pay a “fine,” and move on. No matter how often it happens, that’s as far as it goes-right?

No. What most foreigners don’t know is that there is always another variable in the equation of these encounters, and that variable is a place called the Center for Social Rehabilitation #1, or TsSR. It’s a real building that exists in a place where you can easily find it, on the 24th kilometer of the Dmitrovskoye Shosse- and what it is, in effect, is a secret prison for foreigners with visa problems.

(more…)