(Articles sorted by the date they were added to The eXiled archives, not their original publish dates.)
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…
Posted on: February 5th, 2011 | Comments (8)
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…
Posted on: December 14th, 2010 | Comments (23)
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…
Posted on: September 29th, 2010 | Comments (8)
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…
Posted on: September 6th, 2010 | Comments (33)
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…
Posted on: August 27th, 2010 | Comments (47)
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…
Posted on: August 25th, 2010 | Comments (9)
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:…
Posted on: July 22nd, 2010 | Comments (28)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
Yo ho ho ho time in Somalia! What’s the bestest present kids dream of in faraway Puntland, where piracy is more than a Disney marketing gimmick? A supertanker, that’s what. A Saudi supertanker is the ultimate in stuffed stockings: 100…
Today I’ll finally keep my promise and tell you about my favorite book on the Horn of Africa. Remember a couple columns back, I promised to tell you about a great book on the Ethiopian/Somali wars? Of course I promised…
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw…
Laurent Nkunda: War Nerd Hero If you ever want to find a real hero, here’s one way to recognize him: the TV news will be making him into a monster 24/7. Today’s monster hero is the Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda,…
Can I time these articles or what? The day after I put up my article on Ethiopia’s troubles in Somalia, 5 car bombs go off in two Somali cities targeting the Ethiopian consulate in Hargeisa, the Presidential Palace (such as…
A couple of years ago I mentioned that Ethiopian troops were occupying Mogadishu and said it was the perfect experimental setup for us. Now we could find out if anybody could pacify that place. Well, the answer’s in, because the…
Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes. Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the…
