This article was first published in The eXile on November 13, 2003. Reading the Western press accounts of the Khodorkovsky arrest has at times been as unpleasant as one of my famous giardia attacks. I’m not sure which version is more ridiculous:…

This article was first published on November 21, 2007 in The eXile. It was just after 1 a.m. on Monday morning when I pulled my rental car up to my apartment building. I’d just spent the last 48 hours working as…

STEPANAKERT, NAGORNO-KARABAKH — It took my taxi driver and me an hour to get out of Yerevan. Most of it was spent waiting in line to fill up his gas tank. Not with gasoline. No, it was the kind of…

This was first published in The eXile in March 2008 On Friday, a group of Russian performance artists stripped off their clothes and started fucking in the middle of Moscow’s Biology Museum in an act they called “Fuck For Medvedev!”…

In all of America, isn’t there one person brave enough to dump wet cement on Reagan’s Hollywood Boulevard star? Isn’t there one bitter reject with nothing to lose, willing to pour lighter fluid over the “tributes” Reagan’s fans have been…

Homeless Mourn Reagan Normanson PodKristolwitz June 10, 2004 NEW YORK (Weekly Standard) — Hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans mourned the death of former president Ronald Reagan, whom they view as a hero and patron for cutting government funding of…

This article was first published in The eXile on June 10, 2004 “One thing’s for sure. Pessimism never created a job.” – From Bush’s new anti-Kerry television ad For my first two months out here, watching the Republican goon-machine retreat into the…

This article was first published in the New York Press on February 8, 2005. Thank God for the Iraqi insurgency. If it weren’t for the resistance tying us down, we would have already moved against far more serious foes like…

Reader John M. sent us one of The eXile’s fabled “lost basement tapes”: our 1998 post-crisis Christmas charity song, “Send Them Crack” by “Bandit-Aid”: a giant fuck-you from all of us in Russia to the IMF, World Bank and all…

Which chick scares you more from a public health perspective? Spring is here and so are migrant birds. That means another bout of bird-flu media-frenzy. H5N1 was supposed to be a pandemic, remember? The Bubonic Plague without borders. Millions would…

When Amazon started printing readers’ book reviews on the net, a window opened briefly on the mental worlds of ordinary people — or, as Harry Dean Stanton so memorably called them, “ordinary fuckin’ people.” Everyone should have a look at…

This article was first published in The eXile on April 27, 2000. The nonviolent teach-in at a church in Colombia Heights just begged to be sneered at. You couldn’t help it. Here in the church basement, hundreds of protest-eager students…

This review was first published in The eXile on March 21, 2002. Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal…

This classic “prank” first published in the summer of 1999 ranks as one of the eXile’s least-successful pranks (which paradoxically made it x-tra annoying) on our longtime nemesis Michael McFaul–formerly a top Clinton USAID official in Moscow, Carnegie Endowment and…

This article first appeared in The eXile on June 1, 2007 For months now, our overseas readers have been asking us, “What’s a gopnik?” They have a vague idea of what a gopnik looks like, thanks to our Face Control page:…

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…

When the fourth of July rolls around, you’re supposed to think of, I don’t know, the Constitution and backyard cookouts like in old Chevy ads—but for me, it’s really Gettysburg we’re celebrating. Greatest battle in American history. But the battle,…

Faced!  Wheelchair-bound eXiled Editor Yasha Levine finds out that in Russia, provincial clubbing ain’t for cripples Editor’s note: We reprint this eXile Classic, first published in The eXile on September 25, 2007, to commemorate Russia’s recent triumph in the Vancouver Winter…

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…

This article was first published in The eXile on February 19, 2004. Haiti popped into the news again, and I decided it was time to tell the whole military history of the place. It’s got to be the most amazing,…